Worktop templating in Thamesmead

Yes. Thamesmead is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE28, SE2. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. 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. 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.

Walls are dense block or in-situ concrete with a bonded plaster, so the bottom course of tiles brings plaster with it when the old top comes off. Carcass heights are read individually, since legs bottoming out on concrete mean the units do not share one plane. Recorded as it is, not as it was drawn. Fixing into precast concrete needs the right anchors and serious dust control, nothing here takes a plasterboard fixing.

Raised pedestrian decks, podium levels and garage undercrofts mean the front door is often nowhere near where the van can park, and some blocks are reached only by a walkway or a small lift. 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. That is part of what the visit is for.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop replacement. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Two to three hours on site, with the sink, tap and hob physically present. Units fitted, fixed and level first.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. A layout templated off one wall instead of one datum will not sit right once all the pieces are down together. 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.

Dot-and-dab plasterboard sounds solid and is hollow behind, so anything fixed through it has to hit a dab or a batten rather than a void. 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. Every base unit fixed to the wall, packed and levelled, and any dry-lining or patching completed - the template reads the wall face it is given, so that has to be the finished face. Consent for the work sits with the freeholder or the managing body, and getting it in writing first avoids a crew arriving to a locked door. The template happens when the units are in, fixed and level, whoever is fitting them. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come.