Worktop templating in Paddington

Yes. Paddington is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W2. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. 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.

The room is genuinely square and the units are plumb, so the visit is more about the building than about the kitchen. New-build rooms are genuinely square, but they are dot-and-dab plasterboard, and the taped internal angle is where it goes wrong - the board bellies at the corner and the run picks up a few millimetres over the last 300mm. Recorded as it is, not as it was drawn. Concierge slots are short, so the whole slab set has to be on site in one movement - stage it kerbside first rather than making three trips to the van.

These towers run a full logistics process - book the loading bay off the estate road, a two-hour slot, ID and RAMS to concierge, protection in the lift, and no works outside 8am to 6pm weekdays. Some blocks require materials to go through a basement service corridor rather than the residential lobby. Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. 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.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop replacement. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. Upgrading a builder-finish kitchen is mostly a swap, so the cost sits in the material choice rather than in the shape of the room. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. The room as it is, not as it was drawn.

The free end is what needs deciding early: square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall to the floor, and a waterfall is cut in sequence off the same part of the slab. Join positions and vein direction are marked on the template drawing before it leaves site. The drawing leaves site complete. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where a partition has been built off the floor screed rather than off the slab, it moves, and a mitre bonded across that corner is the first thing to open. 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. Boards taped or skimmed and finished, units fixed back to the wall and levelled off, and the appliances on site - the wall must be at its final thickness on template day, so no tiler or splashback fitter gets ahead of the worktop. 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. No stone is cut from a plan.