Worktop design and quotation in St Katharine Docks

Yes. St Katharine Docks is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E1W. 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. Tell us at enquiry stage and it is priced properly, because a crew stood waiting is the most expensive thing on any job. Nothing here is added after the fact. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Low-rise blocks are three or four storeys with a single stair and no lift, so pieces go up on edge and the half-landing sets the maximum length. The fixed lines do not shrink with the room, so on a small kitchen they are a larger share of the total than the stone. You see it before you commit to anything. Barrier and dwell-time limits mean the slab comes off the van in one go, so the crew and the route need to be sorted before it arrives.

The estate is privately managed with barrier-controlled vehicle entry, so the van needs booking in and a time-limited pass to reach the block door. Once inside it is a flat, level route across paved quayside, but lifts are small 1970s cars and some blocks route deliveries through a basement service corridor. Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. An access-driven join is priced like any other join, and people are always surprised to see one on a dead straight run. It appears as its own line rather than buried in a rate.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. Everything is itemised: material, template, fabrication, fitting, each cut-out and each metre of upstand. Nothing payable until we template. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. That changes what the quote should be compared against, because the shape of the job is not the same as a single family kitchen. Material is the slab only, and it says so.

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. Each run is priced on its own line against the supply rate, with the join count and the reason for each join stated. No installed rate per square metre, because it is not a real number. 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. It is fabrication time rather than material, so it appears on the fabrication line and not in the square metre figure. Better on the quote than in a variation. Send the run lengths plus a photo of every corner of the kitchen so we can spot boxed ducts, and tell us whether the sink is staying in the same position. 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. Nothing is payable until we template, so a quote can sit while consents and decisions catch up. Written to be read by whoever is paying.