Worktop templating in Barbican

Yes. Barbican is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC2Y. It is worked on our the City run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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.

Post-war terraces have a short straight hall to the kitchen, which is a good deal kinder than the houses they replaced. Post-war terraces have a fairly shallow, standardised kitchen, and the walls tend to lean rather than bow, so the scribe at worktop height is different from the one at plinth level - the template only cares about the line where the stone will land. Recorded as it is, not as it was drawn. Do a full dry run of the route from car park lift to flat door before ordering, because the Barbican's walk-in is longer and more awkward than any staircase in the City.

There is no vehicle access to the podium at all - you park in one of the estate car parks below, then use a car park lift and walk the highwalks and internal corridors, which can be several hundred metres with multiple fire doors and level changes. Lift cars in the residential cores are small with low ceilings, so anything over about 2.2m has to be assessed against the specific core before you cut. 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. The templater measures that route on the same visit, so the drawing leaves site already knowing the maximum piece. It goes on the drawing with the run dimensions.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop replacement. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. 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 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. 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. Units fixed, packed level and pushed as far back as the leaning wall allows, walls made good to final thickness with tiling left until after the worktop, and the sink, tap and hob on site so cut-outs are set from the real items. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. The templater needs the sink, tap and hob on site, and a Belfast sink installed at its final height. No stone is cut from a plan.