Reception counters and desks in Blackheath

Yes. Blackheath is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE3. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. A van waiting on a loading concession has somebody standing with it, because a vehicle left unattended is the one that collects the ticket. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. The longest counter piece decides the swing radius outside. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

A basement is often reached by its own door under the front steps, and that door is smaller than anything else on the route. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow deep unit off a parade, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. The knee recess is argued over hardest where the floor is shallowest. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. A counter is worse off than a kitchen here, because it usually stands clear of the wall and has nothing behind it to hide a gap. A lobby floor that falls is packed out under the joinery.

Timber nosings chip under a slipped edge, so the treads are covered along the whole flight rather than only at the landings. A counter top is one long piece with no run of cabinets to break it, so the route decides the join count before the sightlines get a vote. Protection stays down until the last piece is bedded. Controlled hours that end in the middle of the afternoon make the second half of the day easy and put the whole problem in the first half. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Packaging leaves with us rather than filling the lobby.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop replacement. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. Matching across sites means matching blocks, not matching names. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. Where an operator is fitting out several receptions, the counters come off one slab run so the desks read as a set rather than as neighbours. The counter is quoted with the programme written beside it.

Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Shelf depth is set by the knee space underneath it. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. What a counter is scribed to is the joiner's carcass rather than the plaster, which is why it is templated after the carcass is fixed and never before. Nothing on a counter is corrected with sealant. Send photographs taken walking from the pavement through the door to where the counter will stand, along with the carcass dimensions once the joiner has fixed it. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. The same split runs through commercial property: a landlord fitting out a shell and a tenant fitting out their own reception want different things from one counter. The building manager sets the hours the counter goes in.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. The longest piece is decided before the shape is finalised.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Georgian houses put the kitchen in a basement or a rear closet wing, and the stairs down to it are the tightest part of the whole route. A front room converted into a surgery or a salon gives a small lobby and a counter that still has to leave width for people to get past it. Protected finishes decide the fixings before the drawing is finished.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. These parades have a step up off the pavement and a door that was never sized for a counter top, so the shopfront caps the piece length. A desk seen from a whole floor is finished on every edge.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The original front door is narrow and the hall is often the only way in, which puts a ceiling on the longest single piece. Two working surfaces at two heights, a return between them and clear knee space under the lower one: that is the shape almost every counter ends up being, whatever the front elevation promised. Nothing about the knee space is left for the fitters to improvise.