Kitchen worktops in Sands End

Yes. The old cottage terraces have very small footprints, with kitchens of about 2.2-2.6m and rear additions too narrow to take an island of any kind. The redeveloped industrial land next to them delivers new apartments and townhouses with open-plan kitchens on a 3-3.5m run plus an island, all with fixed underfloor heating and services that dictate exactly where a socket or a downdraught can sit. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. A templater circling for a space arrives late into a slot that was already tight, and the drawing is what suffers. The templater needs a proper stop, not a pause.

Victorian artisan cottage terrace, former gasworks and industrial site redevelopment, riverside apartment block and modern courtyard townhouse. Block and beam floors with blockwork walls are true enough that the scribes are light and the joins can be pulled tight. 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.

Ongoing construction across the regeneration area means temporary road layouts, contractor gates and hoarding lines that change month to month, so the approach needs confirming on the day. In finished blocks it is the standard managed routine - booked bay, goods lift, corridor protection - while the cottage streets have no loading bays and heavy resident parking. A car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a three-metre worktop however it is stood, and there is no trimming it on the landing. 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.

Worktop installation, worktop fabrication and worktop templating, in that order. 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. No stone is ever cut from a plan, which is inconvenient exactly when a programme is tight. Units fitted, fixed and level first. In the new-build townhouses the underfloor heating manifolds sit in the utility run, so agree cut-outs and access panels with the M and E drawings before templating.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. That is nested before any glass goes on the saw. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Radiused, polished, and clear of the joins. 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.

A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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.