Reception counters and desks in Castelnau

Yes. Castelnau is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW13. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Trolleys cross block paving badly, so boards go down first. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A basement kitchen has a flagged or concrete floor laid straight onto the ground, so it is solid, cold and rarely within ten millimetres of level. 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. A desk seen from a whole floor is finished on every edge. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. 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. Where the plaster bows, the counter is drawn away from it.

Lift doors close on a timer that takes no account of somebody holding a worktop, so a pair of hands stays on the buttons at each end. 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. Every re-grip near a finished front edge is planned out beforehand. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. One space, one visit, and the counter goes in whole.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop splashbacks & upstands, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. 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. A spare offcut kept back can save a whole counter later. 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. Repeat receptions are worth settling once and then leaving alone.

It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. 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 counter shape follows the queue first and the slab second. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

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. 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 shadow gap solves what a scribe cannot. 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. The operator uses the counter; the owner pays for it.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. A car will often hold more than its doors will admit, and it is the clear width between the door edges that a piece actually has to pass through. 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. The counter is sized to the way in before it is sized to the slab.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Where the goods entrance is round the back, the carry is priced from there.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Ceilings are generous and the rooms are narrow, so the runs are long, the aisle is tight and there is nowhere to stand a slab on edge. 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. A reception is in use the morning after, and that sets the sequence.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. An external corner on a counter is seen from both sides at once, so it is mitred rather than butted and the pattern is carried round it. A back-of-counter return is a separate piece with its own edges.