Reception counters and desks in East Acton

Yes. East Acton is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W3. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Ealing. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Outside opening hours is usually when the kerb is free. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The wall between the kitchen and the hall is load-bearing blockwork rather than a stud, so an opening through it is a lintel job and not an afternoon with a bolster. Estates of this kind carry the buildings that serve them: a housing office, a health centre, a community hall, and every one has a counter the public queues at. The building around the lobby decides the counter more than the brief does. 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. 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.

Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. 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. Nothing is carried through a reception still taking visitors. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Whoever holds the lease usually holds the loading bay.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, 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. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. 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 mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. 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 stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

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. 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. Tell us the hours the building can be worked in and whether the lobby stays open, and send photographs of every corner so we can find the ducts before we draw. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. 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. What is left behind at lease end is a specification question.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Whole streets went up to two or three plans, so the house next door has the same kitchen and forty years of extensions have made none of them measure the same. A housing office counter is used hard and cleaned harder, so the surface is specified for wear and the front edge for being leaned on all day. A shopfront door caps the counter length before the slab does.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. 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 counter join lines up with the plane above it or it gets moved.

Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Ceilings sit at about two point three metres and the head of the window is close under them, so a unit over the window has very little wall to hold onto. These are the buildings where the transaction shelf earns its keep, because the people served at it are the people the standard was written for. A porter's desk stands on its own carcass, fixed into nothing original.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. 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. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Corner sinks and corner hobs sit exactly where the joint wants to be, so on an L the cut-out positions get settled before the join positions do. Where the front is curved the top is cut on a waterjet, and the carcass has to be built to the same radius rather than close to it. Yield on a counter is lost in the returns, not in the length.