Worktop design and quotation in South Wimbledon

Yes. South Wimbledon 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. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. Tell us at enquiry stage and it is priced properly, because a crew stood waiting is the most expensive thing on any job. Nothing here is added after the fact. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Floors are suspended timber over a shallow void and have moved, so the units are packed and levelled before anything is set on them. The second thing is the carry route: front door, narrow hall, a turn at the stairs and often a step down into the extension, which can mean a piece that would template in one length has to be split to physically get into the room. That is what the itemised lines are for. Old walls out here bow badly over a 3m run, so scribe generously and expect to take 10 to 15mm off the back edge rather than trusting the plaster line.

Front doors open more or less straight onto the pavement with no front garden to stage on, and Merton High Street plus the tram line limit where a van can sit. Hallways are around 900mm wide with a dogleg at the stairs, so the slab is turned on edge before the first corner. Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. We price the carry from what you tell us about the route, so photographs of the approach are worth more to us than a floor plan. You see that figure before we template, not after.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. 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. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Comparing quotes only works when they itemise the same things, and this is where the differences usually hide. Itemised, so it can be compared honestly. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. That changes what the quote should be compared against, because the shape of the job is not the same as a single family kitchen. Nothing payable until we template.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. It is the shape rather than the square metreage that moves the number, which is why two kitchens the same size quote differently. No installed rate per square metre, because it is not a real number. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. It is fabrication time rather than material, so it appears on the fabrication line and not in the square metre figure. Priced as fabrication, not as area. Send us the run lengths, plus photos taken walking from the pavement through the hall to the kitchen so we can see the door widths and the stair turn. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. The quote is written so it can be read by whoever is paying rather than only by whoever is standing in the kitchen. Nothing payable until template.