Reception counters and desks in Brockley

Yes. Brockley is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE4. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. A resident bay and a shared-use bay can sit on the same street under different rules, and it is usually the shared one a visitor permit or a ticket touches. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Packaging leaves with us rather than filling the lobby. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The external wall on the passage side has never been rendered, so it is cold, solid and honest to fix into. 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. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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. The front edge runs straight whatever the wall behind it does.

A car ceiling at 2.2m sets the tallest thing that will stand in it, and the trap panel and light fitting take a slice off even that. 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. A shared-use bay allows a paid stay up to a set maximum, and that maximum is routinely shorter than the working day the job needs. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. A bay suspension is a line on the quote, not a surprise.

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. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. Two desks on one site still take two templates. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. Matching across sites means matching blocks, not matching names.

Everything on an island is fed from underneath, extraction, a socket run, a hob and sometimes a waste, and each of them wants its hole before the top is bonded down. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Nothing is drawn square that the carcass did not build square. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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. Where the plaster bows, the counter is drawn away from it. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. A shadow gap solves what a scribe cannot.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. The knee recess makes any twist in the carcass visible, since a shelf with nothing beneath it has nowhere for a packer to go. The knee recess is checked for square before the shelf is cut.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. The larder under the stairs is usually still there and still opens into the kitchen, so the run stops at a door that cannot be moved. 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.

Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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. The counter is quoted with the programme written beside it.