Reception counters and desks in Eltham

Yes. Eltham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE9. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. A red route puts a clock on a counter that will not be rushed. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

The boiler has usually been moved out of the main house into the addition, and its flue, its pipework and its condensate all cross the wall the run wants. 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. Housing office counters get cleaned harder than they get used. Where the structure cannot be cut into, the stone is relieved instead, and a relief that deep changes both the yield off the slab and how the piece is handled. 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. What the joiner left behind is what the templater records.

A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. 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 join forced by a doorway still lands over a carcass support. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Where the bay is booked by the hour, pieces come off in fitting order.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop design & quotation and worktop templating. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. What the operator needs at the shelf outranks the elevation. 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. 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. The knee recess is not a variable between sites.

Knee room under a breakfast bar is measured from the face of the cabinets rather than from the edge of the stone, so a deep apron quietly eats the depth somebody actually gets to sit 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. The longest piece is decided before the shape is finalised. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

An intruding steel column, a brick pier or a downstand breaks a run that would otherwise have been one clean piece. 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 bowed lobby wall is a scribe, and a scribe takes hours. 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. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. 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 counter outlives the tenancy more often than not.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Where a column lands in the run the template plots its actual outline so the stone is cut to fit around it rather than stopped short and filled. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. The counter is scribed to the carcass, and the carcass to the floor.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. Three stools along one side need more clear length than most plans allow, and once the seating depth is fixed the piece either grows or it loses a seat. 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. Where the front curves, the shelf below it curves with it.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Gas, waste and later wiring were boxed in against the wall long after the house was built, and that boxing is what the run has to clear. 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. The transaction shelf carries the detail the upper counter hides.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. 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. The return between the two levels is drawn first and cut first.