Kitchen worktops in Plaistow

Yes. The standard here is a bay-fronted terrace with the kitchen in the rear addition, around 2.4m along one wall plus a short return, and a separate outside WC that has often been swallowed into the kitchen. Where the side return has been filled in you get a wider room with a 3m run and a small island. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. 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.

Victorian and Edwardian bay-fronted terrace, post-war council housing and 1990s infill. A bay-fronted terrace has a long hall running past the stairs to the kitchen, so the hall turn caps the piece length before the run length does. Lath-and-plaster and bowed brickwork mean we template for scribes rather than straight cuts, and each piece is offered up and eased in rather than dropped straight down. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

Dense terraced streets with front gardens but almost no off-street parking, and permit restrictions during the working day mean a dispensation is usually needed to park across a bay for the fit. Hallways are narrow with a stair rising immediately from the front door, so a 3m piece has to be angled in and walked through on edge. Everything comes through the front door and down the hall, so the tightest point on the route is usually the newel post at the foot of the stairs. Worth remembering that the old tops have to come out the way the new ones come in, and a laminate run is easier to remove in one length than to carry in one. The strip-out is planned around it.

Worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop installation, in that 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. Units fitted, fixed and level first. Old outside-WC returns leave a stepped wall in the kitchen, and that step is the single most commonly mis-measured thing in these houses.

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. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Dry-lay first, always. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The laminate has been covering it up. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

Consent for the work sits with the freeholder or the managing body, and getting it in writing first avoids a crew arriving to a locked door. The template happens when the units are in, fixed and level, whoever is fitting them. No stone is cut from a plan. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.