Worktop templating in Gloucester Road

Yes. Gloucester Road is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW7. It is run from the New Malden side, covering South West London & Surrey. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. A templater circling for a space arrives late into a slot that was already tight, and the drawing is what suffers. 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.

External walls are thick and the run under the window sits in a deep reveal that has to be templated rather than assumed square. Mansion-block kitchens usually have a serviced riser or boxed pipework somewhere in the run, and the boxing is rarely the same depth from one end to the other, so the template takes the depth at worktop height at several points rather than one reading. No stone is ever cut from a plan. Old service lifts are the hard limit on this street - if the car will not take it, the joint gets designed around the lift, not around the kitchen.

Blocks here have a front porter's desk and a separate tradesman's entrance round the side, and materials go in the service lift only, with protective blankets on the walls. The lifts are old, often around 1000mm by 1300mm internally with a low car ceiling, which caps a stood-on-edge slab at roughly 2.2-2.4m unless the stairs are used instead. A car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a three-metre worktop however it is stood, and there is no trimming it on the landing. 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.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop replacement. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. No stone is ever cut from a plan, which is inconvenient exactly when a programme is tight. Units fitted, fixed and level first. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Two to three hours on site, with the sink, tap and hob physically present. Units fitted, fixed and level first.

Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. A layout templated off one wall instead of one datum will not sit right once all the pieces are down together. Real angles, not plan angles. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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. Boxing and riser casings built, cased and finished to their final surface, units fixed and levelled, and building access, lift booking and porter arrangements agreed so both the template visit and the later fit can run. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come.