Worktop design and quotation in Gidea Park

Yes. Gidea Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM2. It is run from the Essex side, covering Essex & East London. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. Where a bay suspension or a permit is needed, that is a real cost and it goes on the quote instead of appearing later. It is one line among the others, and it is honest. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen is usually a rear room extended into the garden, with the original external wall now standing inside the run. These are typically two runs and a return, often into a rear extension, and the return piece is the awkward one — short, wide and rarely nesting well against the long pieces on the slab, so slab yield rather than total area is what pushes the material line up. You see it before you commit to anything. Original houses here have thick, irregular walls and out-of-square corners, so we template every wall run individually instead of assuming parallel sides.

Leafy roads with long front drives and mature planting, so the van gets on the plot but the carry from drive to door is longer than average and often over gravel. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. We price the carry from what you tell us about the route, so photographs of the approach are worth more to us than a floor plan. Nothing about it gets estimated after the fact. 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 templating and worktop fabrication. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. Comparing quotes only works when they itemise the same things, and this is where the differences usually hide. Itemised, so it can be compared honestly. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Everything is itemised: material, template, fabrication, fitting, each cut-out and each metre of upstand. Itemised, so it can be compared honestly.

An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. It is the shape rather than the square metreage that moves the number, which is why two kitchens the same size quote differently. The join count is stated with its reason. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. It is fabrication time rather than material, so it appears on the fabrication line and not in the square metre figure. Priced as fabrication, not as area. Send the extension drawing or the unit layout with the actual appliance model numbers, since cut-out sizes come from the appliance, not the cabinet. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. The quote is written so it can be read by whoever is paying rather than only by whoever is standing in the kitchen. Written to be read by whoever is paying.