Worktop templating in Merton Park

Yes. Merton Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW19. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. The templater needs a proper stop, not a pause. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These houses usually sit in their own grounds with a long approach, so the carry from van to door is longer than anything inside the building. The island is templated for its overhang, its support and the position of the hob or sink within it, with sockets and any pop-up left where they will genuinely be. Recorded as it is, not as it was drawn. Rooms here are rarely square, the original walls run out by 20mm or more corner to corner, so template the full room rather than assuming a 90 degree return at the dresser end.

Conservation area rules make skips and long-term van standing awkward, and the estate is characterised by clipped hedges and narrow gated front paths that a two-man carry cannot get a wide slab through squarely. The tram line splits the area, so the approach has to be planned from the right side of the crossing. The barrier, the entry code and the estate rules decide when a van can get near the door, and none of that is negotiable on the day. Door widths, turn diagonals and any change of level are recorded on the drawing alongside the run dimensions. The template records it along with everything else.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop design & quotation. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. Join positions and vein direction are marked on the template drawing before it leaves site. 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.

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. 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. All runs and the island carcass fixed down and levelled to one datum, with the sink, tap and hob on site - an island cannot be templated while it is still loose or sitting on packers. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come.