Worktop templating in Hampstead Garden Suburb

Yes. Hampstead Garden Suburb is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW11, N2. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. It goes on the job sheet for the fitting crew. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A two-up two-down has a kitchen that was never designed to be one, so the run is short, the ceiling is low and every millimetre of depth gets argued over. The template plots the bow along the back of the run, which is why a tape reading taken beforehand never matches. Recorded as it is, not as it was drawn. You work around what is already there in the Suburb, because the things that would normally be taken out to get a slab in, a window, a door frame, a fence panel, are exactly the things that are controlled.

Narrow lanes and closes, grass verges that vans are not welcome on, front paths through planted gardens, and hedges and gates the Trust will not allow to be temporarily removed. Off-street parking is limited and the carry from a legal stopping point is often long. Everything comes through the front door and down the hall, so the tightest point on the route is usually the newel post at the foot of the stairs. The templater measures that route on the same visit, so the drawing leaves site already knowing the maximum piece. It goes on the drawing with the run dimensions.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop design & quotation and worktop fabrication. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Two to three hours on site, with the sink, tap and hob physically present. Units fitted, fixed and level first. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. Appliances on site, not on order.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. Join positions and vein direction are marked on the template drawing before it leaves site. One datum for the whole room. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. The template 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. Units fixed and packed level over the sloping floor, walls replastered and dry at their final thickness (tiling and splashbacks go on after the worktop, never before), and the sink, tap and hob physically on site, with a Belfast sink built in and set at its finished height. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come.