Worktop templating in Blackwall

Yes. Blackwall is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E14. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. Two hours is the realistic figure. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Infill plots usually put the kitchen at the back with wide doors to a small garden, and that opening is the best route in. New-build rooms are genuinely square, but they are dot-and-dab plasterboard, and the taped internal angle is where it goes wrong - the board bellies at the corner and the run picks up a few millimetres over the last 300mm. No stone is ever cut from a plan. Delivery windows are tight because of the tunnel traffic, so the fit gets sequenced to unload first and set out second.

The tunnel approach and its slip roads carry heavy traffic with no stopping, so plan the drop for off-peak or you will be circling. Towers require a loading bay booking, dimensions confirmed for the goods lift, and building management usually insist on lift protection and a named delivery contact. 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. Door widths, turn diagonals and any change of level are recorded on the drawing alongside the run dimensions. That is part of what the visit is for.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop installation. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. Appliances on site, not on order. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. No stone is ever cut from a plan, which is inconvenient exactly when a programme is tight. The room as it is, not as it was drawn.

The advantage of a U is that every join can be put over a gable in a corner, so nothing lands in the middle of a clear length. The template records every angle in that shape as it actually is rather than as the plan drew it. 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 lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. The template plots it as it is, at the exact height the worktop will sit, and the drawing carries that through. Plotted, not estimated. Boards taped or skimmed and finished, units fixed back to the wall and levelled off, and the appliances on site - the wall must be at its final thickness on template day, so no tiler or splashback fitter gets ahead of the worktop. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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.