Visiting a Bedrock Quartz showroom and picking out a stone slab marks the beginning of revitalizing your kitchen with new marble, granite, quartzite, or quartz countertops. Schedule permitting, and the installation date could be sooner than you anticipated. But between your visit and actual installation, there is an intermediate step known as templating.
Fabricators in the stone countertop industry rely on templating to make sure their fabrication is accurate. Templating is the process of creating an exact, detailed ‘map’ of the countertop service before any stone is cut.
In the old days, templating was accomplished with the tape measure, pieces of plywood, wood strips, and glue. Modern fabricators are more likely to use digital tools for the job. Either way, templating is a crucial step toward ensuring that new stone countertops fit perfectly.
What Templating Accomplishes
In the showroom, we can get a general idea of your countertop space and how everything fits together. But with stone materials, installers have only one chance to get it right. Getting it wrong equates to an expensive mistake. Templating significantly reduces the risks of making such mistakes.
Here’s what fabricators accomplish by templating:
- Precise Measurements – Templating provides precise measurements of everything from cabinets to walls to sinks and appliances. Anything that could potentially impact the fit is measured precisely.
- Fabrication Accuracy – Templating ensures fabrication accuracy before new countertops ever reach the customer’s home. Accuracy is essential, because being off by even one-eighth of an inch at any given point can throw off the entire installation.
- Customization – Not every kitchen is identical. Some kitchens aren’t even built with common layouts. By templating, fabricators can more effectively customize stone countertops regardless of how a kitchen is laid out.
- Efficiency – Digital templating increases efficiency by giving fabricators instant access to accurate measurements. Turnaround time is quicker so that installation dates can be moved up. In essence, you get your new countertops at the earliest possible date.
Even though templating adds an extra step to the process, investing the time and resources in it is worthwhile. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine just how difficult stone countertop fabrication would be without a digital template to work with.
Stone Is an Unforgiving Material
Templating is necessary because stone is an unforgiving material. When you’re working with wood and laminate, there are ways to get around an imperfect fit without compromising structural integrity or aesthetics. It is not so easy with stone.
Stone countertops cannot easily be modified once cut. Furthermore, fabricators only get one opportunity to make accurate cuts. So they want to be doubly sure they know exactly what a layout looks like and what the precise measurements are.
No Kitchen Is Perfectly Symmetric
In addition to stone being unforgiving, no kitchen is perfectly symmetric. In fact, every kitchen has its unique characteristics that separate it from all others. Walls may not be perfectly straight. Cabinets might not be perfectly square. Fixtures might require unique cutouts.
Templating is a way to ensure that all the unique characteristics in a given kitchen are accounted for during the fabrication process. Trying to account for them after the fact does not tend to produce the best finished product.
So now you know about templating. It’s a common practice in the stone countertop industry. If you have been thinking about stone countertops for your kitchen or bath, we invite you to visit any of our Utah showrooms. We have a great selection of granite, marble, quartzite, and quartz products for you to look at. We are sure you will find something you love.
