Worktop templating in St Margarets

Yes. St Margarets is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW1. It is run from the New Malden side, covering South West London & Surrey. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. 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.

Original joinery is deep and stands proud of the plaster, so the run is plotted to the units rather than to the wall behind them. One datum for the whole room, because a floor that falls end to end shows as a step between island and perimeter. No stone is ever cut from a plan. Gate piers and side alleys under a metre wide are the recurring problem - the slab often has to go through the house because it will not go round it.

A dense one-way street pattern with narrow carriageways, permit bays and a railway bridge that cuts the area in two; the estate roads are wider with driveways but several have gate piers set less than 2.5m apart. A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. The templater measures that route on the same visit, so the drawing leaves site already knowing the maximum piece. That is part of what the visit is for. Tell us what the approach looks like when you book the template and it gets built into the day rather than discovered on it.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. Appliances on site, not on order. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. No stone is ever cut from a plan, which is inconvenient exactly when a programme is tight. Units fitted, fixed and level first.

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. 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.

A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. The laser plots it as it is, at the exact height the worktop will sit, and the drawing carries that through. Plotted, not estimated. 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. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. The templater needs the sink, tap and hob on site, and a Belfast sink installed at its final height. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come.