Worktop templating in Fortune Green

Yes. Fortune Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW6, NW2. It is run from the Watford side, covering Hertfordshire & North London. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. It is noted on the job sheet at template so the fitting crew inherit the answer rather than rediscovering it. Two hours is the realistic figure. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Block and beam floors with blockwork walls are true enough that the scribes are light and the joins can be pulled tight. New-build rooms are genuinely square, but they are dot-and-dab plasterboard, and the taped internal angle is where it goes wrong - the board bellies at the corner and the run picks up a few millimetres over the last 300mm. No stone is ever cut from a plan. Edwardian rear walls here are usually rendered and bowed, so expect to scribe the back edge and pack the units before setting anything down.

Quiet residential streets with permit parking and better van access than most of NW6, though the climb up from Fortune Green Road is a real factor on the carry. Front doors open into a porch and then a hall with a right turn at the stairs, which is the pinch point on almost every house. Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. A template taken without walking the route produces a drawing that cuts beautifully and will not go in. That is part of what the visit is for. Tell us what the approach looks like when you book the template and it gets built into the day rather than discovered on it.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation and worktop replacement. Upgrading a builder-finish kitchen is mostly a swap, so the cost sits in the material choice rather than in the shape of the room. No stone is ever cut from a plan, which is inconvenient exactly when a programme is tight. Appliances on site, not on order. Developer-fitted kitchens come with thin cam-lock carcasses, which are fine under laminate and want bracing before stone goes on them. Two to three hours on site, with the sink, tap and hob physically present. The room as it is, not as it was drawn.

Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. A layout templated off one wall instead of one datum will not sit right once all the pieces are down together. The drawing leaves site complete. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. The laser plots it as it is, at the exact height the worktop will sit, and the drawing carries that through. Measured at worktop height, nowhere else. Boards taped or skimmed and finished, units fixed back to the wall and levelled off, and the appliances on site - the wall must be at its final thickness on template day, so no tiler or splashback fitter gets ahead of the worktop. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. The template happens when the units are in, fixed and level, whoever is fitting them. No stone is cut from a plan.