Worktop templating in Isle of Dogs

Yes. Isle of Dogs 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. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. A templater circling for a space arrives late into a slot that was already tight, and the drawing is what suffers. It goes on the job sheet for the fitting crew. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A riverside block is a managed building with a booked goods lift, a loading bay and a concierge, and all three have to line up on the same day. 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. Two to three hours, once the units are in. It is worth checking on the peninsula whether the address is a 1980s house or a modern tower, because they are completely different access jobs at the same postcode.

The peninsula has limited road access with congestion at the north end, and the internal roads are heavily bollarded around the docks, so routes are longer than they look. Older low-rise dockside houses have narrow front doors and a stair immediately behind them, while the towers need concierge-booked lifts. 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. 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.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop replacement. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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.

Because a peninsula is seen from both sides, the underside of any overhang gets the same edge treatment as the top, which is easy to leave out of a spec. 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 boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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. 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. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. The template happens when the units are in, fixed and level, whoever is fitting them. No stone is cut from a plan.