Reception counters and desks in Brentham Garden Suburb

Yes. Brentham Garden Suburb is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W5. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Ealing. A shared drive is only useful if the neighbour is not the one parked behind the van, so we ask which side the standing belongs to before the date is set. 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.

Cottage terraces have no hall to speak of and the front door opens almost straight into the room, which makes the carry easier and the protection harder. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow unit off a high-street parade, entered up a step, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. Public counters are specified for wear at the front edge. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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. Nothing on a counter is corrected with sealant.

The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. 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. The counter waits on the van until there is somewhere to stand it. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. 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 installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. The counter is quoted with the programme written beside it. 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. 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. Where the lobby stays open, the work runs outside opening hours.

A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. The longest piece is decided before the shape is finalised. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. The template is taken to the carcass as built. 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. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. Where a managing agent has to approve the work, the drawing goes out in a form they can sign without ever standing in the lobby. A managed lobby has rules the counter has to be carried under.

Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. 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. The apertures for cable and card readers are what changes between one desk and the next, and every change is a fresh drawing rather than a variation. A spare offcut kept back can save a whole counter later.

Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. A bay suspension is a line on the quote, not a surprise.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Floors are suspended timber over a shallow void and have moved, so the units are packed and levelled before anything is set on them. 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. A converted front room gives a lobby with no depth to it.

Money does not move until the template is done. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. The rear wall of the addition carries both the back door and the window, which leaves very little unbroken wall for a run to sit against. A reception counter answers to the building it stands in more than to the drawing, because it is fabricated to a carcass somebody else has already built and fixed. Nothing about the knee space is left for the fitters to improvise.