Worktop templating in Nine Elms

Yes. Nine Elms is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW8, SW11. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. A dedicated loading bay or service yard is the easiest arrangement in a managed building, provided the slot is booked and someone has the key to the shutter. 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.

Poured screed over steel decking can fall away across a long run, so level is checked across the whole room before anything is packed. Exposed brick and steel is the whole job here: the brick face is not a flat plane, it moves in and out over its height and along its length, so the scribe is taken at the exact height the worktop will sit rather than off the wall generally. Two to three hours, once the units are in. Get the goods lift internal dimensions in writing before cutting, because a 2.8m piece that will not stand up in the lift car has to be re-cut at the workshop, not on the loading bay.

Every building is managed, loading bay booking, a service lift with a stated internal length, dock time limits and a site induction before anyone goes up. The lift diagonal, not the door, is what limits slab size. The lift has to be booked and blanketed before anything moves, and that booking needs to cover the old tops coming out as well as the new stone going in. A template taken without walking the route produces a drawing that cuts beautifully and will not go in. It goes on the drawing with the run dimensions.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. Units fitted, fixed and level first. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. Two to three hours on site, with the sink, tap and hob physically present. Appliances on site, not on order.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. The template records every angle in that shape as it actually is rather than as the plan drew it. 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 deep scribe comes out of the nest, so how far the stone has to be relieved changes which part of the slab the piece is cut from. One measurement never describes it, which is why a tape reading taken before the visit rarely matches the template. Measured at worktop height, nowhere else. Units fixed and levelled, all steelwork and brick cleaned, sealed and finished, and any boarded sections completed to final thickness so the template picks up the surface the stone will actually meet. Access in a tenanted flat depends on the tenant, so the template and fitting dates are agreed with whoever actually holds the keys. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come.