Reception counters and desks in Broad Green

Yes. Broad Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Crew size follows the distance from the van to the lobby. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The front door of the building sits at the top of a step off a tiled path, so the carry starts outside the building rather than at the door of the flat. That entrance is what caps the counter, because a shopfront door and the step in front of it will take far less than a full-length top, so the run is broken over a support in the carcass rather than gambled on. The lobby was finished by somebody else, and the counter joins it. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. 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. A shelf over a knee recess cannot be packed, so it is cut true.

The top step is rarely the end of it, because a door swinging out onto the landing has to be held back before a piece can come off the flight. 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. A knee recess is an opening, and an opening weakens a piece in transit. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Trolleys cross block paving badly, so boards go down first.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop splashbacks & upstands. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. Where a single building holds several small kitchens, the work arrives as one job rather than four, and it should be cut off the same slab run so the batches genuinely match. 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. A spare offcut kept back can save a whole counter later. Small kitchens in a shared house are all short runs and tight cut-out spacing, which is more bench work per square metre than one large kitchen would be. A fit-out programme puts the counter last, behind the joiner and the electrician, which is exactly when the least time is left to template it. Repeat receptions are worth settling once and then leaving alone.

A doorway partway along one wall breaks that side into two separate pieces, and two short pieces cost more between them than the single long one they replace. 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. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. The back return follows the wall as the wall leans. 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. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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. A managed lobby has rules the counter has to be carried under.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. One space, one visit, and the counter goes in whole.

Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. Where the floor falls away across a lobby the carcass is packed level first, because the top cannot correct anything sitting under it. Column casings take machined returns, not filler.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Counting hands matters more than counting metres on a staircase, because a piece two people lift off a van still wants three on the flight and a fourth watching the trailing corner. The lower transaction shelf is short and easily handled; it is the upper counter that has to be walked in on edge and turned at every corner. Every re-grip near a finished front edge is planned out beforehand.

The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. The knee recess makes any twist in the carcass visible, since a shelf with nothing beneath it has nowhere for a packer to go. What is out of true gets measured, not talked around.