Worktop Full Fit: Template, Manufacture, Delivery and Installation

The full template and fit service of granite or quartz worktops is our bread and butter – the bulk of our work and the bulk of the quotes we tender is our full template and fit service. For how we price this, please see our granite and quartz pricing pages. If you live a long way from us, you may also want to look at how we price for long-distance installations.

Usually, we send our quote and the quote is accepted well in advance of a full template and fit. We have time to check stock levels (if we are dealing with a stock material) or to buy in slabs specially for “bespoke” jobs. Time in advance is so helpful to guarantee a really smooth and swift process, as is lots of clear communication between us and the customer.

The full template and fit service involves TWO visits to your home. One person comes to template – to measure up the entire kitchen carefully. We used to use physical templates in Corex – a kind of plastic sheet – but now work almost entirely with a digital templates generated by a laser measuring system. The data can be sent back to the factory direct from the customer’s site.

It’s all about responsibility. When we commit to the full template and fit service we are committing to getting solid stone worktops to fit correctly in your kitchen. We are responsible for measuring, and on the basis of those measurements, we are responsible for making and installing. If something goes wrong (as it does, from time to time – this is life!) we are responsible for sorting it out.  Please note that:

• We won’t fit what we haven’t templated
• We won’t template without installing

Templating, manufacture, delivery and installation are links in a chain and we only rarely break them up!

For more information on templating, please see our FAQ page here.

Almost all our cutting and polishing occurs at our Surrey granite worktops factory in Charlwood. Superbly equipped with the latest technology in solid stone working, we are able to manufacture large numbers of tailor-made worktops to a high standard of finish in a relatively short time, and at reduced labour cost. For fuller information on our factory, please see here.

The only part of the cutting and polishing work that we frequently do on our customers’ sites is the final trimming of upstands. As they form effectively a 3-dimensionsal element in the fit, it is best to leave that trim until the worktops are actually in.

That aside, the only other very occasional cut on site is when a hob run is very fragile and we take out the hob cutout in situ. This is pretty rare, these days, though.

Cutting on site is generally done in garden, driveway or street outside.

Our granite and quartz worktops are delivered by our own fleet of vans. The drivers are the fitters who will install them. We do not subcontract work at any stage and maintain a smart fleet of liveried vans on the road. Our vans represent an important segment of advertising for us – almost every week we have potential customers contacting us because “we saw your van down our road.”

For more about our vans see here.

Our granite and quartz worktop installation teams usually comprise two fitters, and we often run three teams of two. For a medium sized kitchen without upstands  they will probably need half a morning – and a whole morning with upstands to trim and install.

Really large kitchens can take a whole day to fit, and we sometimes need to send extra men to the site to help handle the stone on the delivery phase if very heavy worktops are involved.

Leaving all joins properly filled and sealed, and the kitchen in a clean and tidy state, is the norm for our fitters. All of them are employed directly by Affordable Granite – we do not sub-contract.