Worktop templating in Stepney Green

Yes. Stepney Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E1. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. 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. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. 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.

Rooms are tall with deep window reveals, and a run finishing into a reveal is templated to it rather than assumed square. Victorian party walls and chimney-breast returns bow along their length, so the template plots the real line rather than assuming a straight one - the template picks up points every few hundred millimetres down the back of the run and the drawing carries that curve through to the saw. Recorded as it is, not as it was drawn. Old masonry walls bow and the chimney breast is never plumb, so template on the finished plaster and expect deep scribes on both ends of the run.

Several of the older houses are listed or in a conservation area, so scaffolding, hoisting and any external route need agreeing in advance. Front steps up to a raised entrance and a narrow original hallway mean a slab has to come in on edge and turn at the stair foot. Hoisting is planned at quote stage or not at all, because the crew, the equipment and the permissions are three separate bookings. The templater measures that route on the same visit, so the drawing leaves site already knowing the maximum piece. The template records it along with everything else.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop design & quotation and worktop fabrication.

The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. The template records every angle in that shape as it actually is rather than as the plan drew it. 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.

A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. It is recorded on the drawing with the run dimensions so the workshop is not guessing. That is why the visit takes two or three hours. Units fixed and packed level over the sloping floor, walls replastered and dry at their final thickness (tiling and splashbacks go on after the worktop, never before), and the sink, tap and hob physically on site, with a Belfast sink built in and set at its finished height. 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.