Reception counters and desks in Falconwood

Yes. Falconwood is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA16, SE9. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. Where the van cannot turn on the plot it has to arrive already facing the right way, so the approach along the street is part of the plan. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. A red route puts a clock on a counter that will not be rushed. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Ceilings run to about two point four metres, so wall units, a splashback and an extractor are all competing for the same short band of wall. Practices in this stock are usually converted houses on or behind an interwar parade: a dental surgery, a veterinary practice or a small office with its reception in what was the front room. The building stays open, so the counter goes in after hours. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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.

The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. 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. A goods lift diagonal belongs on the counter drawing. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. 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 bay is booked by the hour, pieces come off in fitting order.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. The knee recess is not a variable between sites. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. A counter in a working building is an evening job.

Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. A counter join lines up with the plane above it or it gets moved. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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. Confirm whether the reception is at ground level or up the stair, and send the carcass drawing with the chimney breast and any bay recorded on it. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. 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.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. 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. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. Yield on a counter is lost in the returns, not in the length.

An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. The consumer unit and the meter tails often sit in a cupboard in the corner of the kitchen, and that cupboard has to stay reachable whatever goes in around it. The carcass is built around a chimney breast or into a bay, so the counter is drawn to a shape the joiner had to invent rather than to a rectangle, and the return between the upper counter and the transaction shelf rarely nests neatly against the long piece. A shopfront door caps the counter length before the slab does.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. These were built with a coal store and an outside lavatory off the back, and where those got absorbed into the kitchen the walls around them are thinner and later. Two working surfaces at two heights, a return between them and clear knee space under the lower one: that is the shape almost every counter ends up being, whatever the front elevation promised. Serving height comes off the standard, not off the sketch.

Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. Where the floor falls away across a lobby the carcass is packed level first, because the top cannot correct anything sitting under it. The knee recess is checked for square before the shelf is cut.