Reception counters and desks in Foots Cray

Yes. Foots Cray is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA14. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Where the bay is booked by the hour, pieces come off in fitting order. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

There is no back addition on these, so the kitchen is the original rear room and the run is one wall long with a door at each end of it. 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. Goods lifts in old warehouses take longer pieces than most buildings. Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. 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. Two levels means two datums, and they are reconciled on paper.

Sign-in at the gate, a permit on the dash and a named contact are usually wanted before anything comes off the van. 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 way in is walked with the joiner as well as with a tape. 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. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. The transaction shelf can wait on the van; the counter cannot.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop fabrication 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. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. On a fit-out counter the date is half the decision. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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. Nothing is cut until the joinery has been signed off.

Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. 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 curved front is a waterjet job and a carcass problem both. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. 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 public face is the face that has to be right. 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. These kitchens tend to be compact and reasonably square, so the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines are a larger share of the total than the stone is. Where a managing agent has to approve the work, the drawing goes out in a form they can sign without ever standing in the lobby. Approval in writing before a slab is committed to a desk.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. Where the floor falls away across a lobby the carcass is packed level first, because the top cannot correct anything sitting under it. A counter set to the wall instead of to itself will show it.

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. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. 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. External corners on a counter are mitred, never butted.

A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. A lobby is one of the few places a piece can be staged, so the counter comes in early and stands on trestles until the carcass is ready for it. Piece length is capped in the drawing office, not on the landing.

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. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. That rear wall carries the back door and the only window, which leaves very little uninterrupted length for a sink run. That entrance is what caps the counter, because a shopfront door and the step in front of it will take far less than a full-length top, so the run is broken over a support in the carcass rather than gambled on. The knee recess is argued over hardest where the floor is shallowest.