Worktop templating in Bow Common

Yes. Bow Common is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E3, E14. It is run from the Essex side, covering Essex & East London. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. It is noted on the job sheet at template so the fitting crew inherit the answer rather than rediscovering it. 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.

Access is a question about the plot rather than the house: a narrow frontage between older buildings with nowhere obvious to stand a van. 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. Recorded as it is, not as it was drawn. Boilers and gas meters are frequently mounted in the run, so cut-outs and clearances need agreeing on site before anything is fabricated.

Wide estate roads and open parking courts make the physical unload easy, but bollards and locked gates between courts mean the shortest route on a map often is not open. The 1980s infill houses have a straight run from front door to kitchen, which is a rare thing round here. Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. 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 replacement. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. Developer-fitted kitchens come with thin cam-lock carcasses, which are fine under laminate and want bracing before stone goes on them. Two to three hours on site, with the sink, tap and hob physically present. Units fitted, fixed and level first. Upgrading a builder-finish kitchen is mostly a swap, so the cost sits in the material choice rather than in the shape of the room. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. Appliances on site, not on order.

The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. Join positions and vein direction are marked on the template drawing before it leaves site. Real angles, not plan angles. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. One measurement never describes it, which is why a tape reading taken before the visit rarely matches the template. 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. These kitchens tend to be compact and reasonably square, so the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines are a larger share of the total than the stone is. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come.