The site visit: what to measure and what to photograph

Measuring is five minutes with a laser measure: length, width, clear height and the doors. Photographing is what saves the event three weeks later, when you need to remember how the trolley got in and nobody can.

The photographs that help are not the pretty ones. They are: the approach from the street, the entrance door with something next to it for scale, the electrical board, each column, the fire exits and the area where a service point could go. Six photographs and a sketch with four numbers fit on a phone and are worth half an hour of phone calls.

What nobody tells you about the space

There is a short list of things that never appear on a venue’s sales sheet and all appear on the day of the set-up.

  • The available power. A hot buffet with three chafing dishes and a coffee machine runs to several kilowatts, and plenty of multi-purpose rooms have one usable circuit.
  • The steps. Three steps with no ramp between the unloading point and the room doubles the time it takes to get equipment in.
  • The height of the door. It is what decides whether a loaded trolley goes through or has to be unloaded outside.
  • The real access time. The one in the contract and the one the caretaker gives you tend not to match, and the second one wins.
  • Where waste water goes and where the rubbish goes. If you do not ask, it comes up at two in the morning.

Drawing the room in ten minutes with four measurements

You do not need an architect’s survey. A rectangle with the real dimensions, the columns placed and the doors marked is enough to lay out tables and work out the capacity with service gangways, which is the question you actually have to answer.

The precision that matters is in the columns and the doors, not in the decimal places of the wall. A column in the wrong place moves two tables; a centimetre too many on the length of the room moves none.

What to agree in writing with the venue

Four things, and all four fit in one email: access time for setting up, latest time for breaking down, which of the venue’s own furniture you can use, and who is liable for damage.

The third causes the most arguments. «The room’s tables are available» can turn out to mean they are stacked in a store cupboard that needs a key held by somebody who is off that day.

Keeping it for next time

A caterer who works in other people’s rooms goes back to the same rooms. Keeping the measured plan, with its photographs and its notes, turns the second booking into an event with no site visit and the capacity already worked out.

After two years, that library of rooms is a commercial asset: it lets you answer «yes, I know that space, 90 fit with service gangways» in the same email that asks.