Reception counters and desks in Chase Cross

Yes. Chase Cross is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM5. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. The counter comes off the van first and goes in last. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The kitchen is at the front or the back depending on the plan, and which it is decides whether there is a rear door on the route at all. The parades behind terraces of this period carry pharmacies, minicab offices, takeaways and small surgeries, and their counters are the hardest-used stone we fit. A parade unit is entered up a step nobody thought to measure. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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. Twist in a carcass shows first at the transaction shelf.

A height barrier on the car park entrance rules out a tail-lift van outright, and the stone then transfers to a trolley at the barrier itself. 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 transaction shelf goes almost anywhere the upper top will not. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. A booked bay costs less than an hour of a crew standing still.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. 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. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. The return between the two levels is drawn first and cut first. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. 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 long counter magnifies every millimetre the carcass is out. Tell us whether there is rear access off a service road, and send the carcass dimensions with the till, terminal and cable positions marked on them. Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. 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. Sign-off happens before nesting, never after it.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. 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. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. The scribe is cut in the shop, eased on site, and no further.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. 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. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. A counter join lines up with the plane above it or it gets moved.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. 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. Yield on a counter is lost in the returns, not in the length.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. These were built on a solid ground floor slab, so nothing bounces and nothing can be packed down, only up. A pharmacy counter is two heights before anyone draws it, with a consultation position at the low level and a dispensing side that never meets the public, and the apertures for a card reader and a till sit at the transaction shelf. Where the hall is tall, the light finds every seam in the counter.