Worktop templating in Strawberry Hill

Yes. Strawberry Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW1, TW2. It is run from the New Malden side, covering South West London & Surrey. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. It goes on the job sheet for the fitting crew. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Houses of this period came with generous garages and utility rooms, so a second short run of stone is often part of the same job. The typical 1930s kitchen sits at the back with a low window over the sink run, so the template records the exact sill height above the units to settle whether an upstand fits or the stone has to die into a window board. Two to three hours, once the units are in. Big interwar houses have solid floors that fall towards the old back door, so worktop level and floor level diverge across a 4m run - shim early.

Quiet leafy roads with in-and-out drives and space to park on the plot, but a couple of railway-side roads narrow to single file and the level crossing holds traffic; mature front trees limit where a lorry can stop. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. Tell us what the approach looks like when you book the template and it gets built into the day rather than discovered on it.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop design & quotation. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. Extended households run kitchens hard, and that pushes the specification towards granite or sintered stone rather than a light quartz. Two to three hours on site, with the sink, tap and hob physically present. The room as it is, not as it was drawn. Where an annexe has been built or converted, its floor and its walls are newer than the main house and behave differently under the same run. 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.

An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. Join positions and vein direction are marked on the template drawing before it leaves site. One datum for the whole room. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. It is recorded on the drawing with the run dimensions so the workshop is not guessing. That is why the visit takes two or three hours. All base units in, including anything standing on the later extension slab, walls skimmed to final thickness, and the sink, tap and hob delivered so cut-outs and tap centres are set from the actual items. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. Appliances on site, not on order.