Reception counters and desks in Forest Hill

Yes. Forest Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE23. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Whoever holds the lease usually holds the loading bay. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Ceilings are high enough that an extractor over the island has a long drop, and its position is fixed before the island top is templated. Large houses in these streets get converted into clinics, nurseries, small offices and members' rooms, and the reception ends up in a hall that was never meant to hold a desk. A converted front room gives a lobby with no depth to it. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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. Where the plaster bows, the counter is drawn away from it.

A hall radiator or a coat hook at shoulder height takes a hundred millimetres off the usable width, and a hundred millimetres is often the entire margin. 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. Piece length is capped in the drawing office, not on the landing. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. The longest counter piece decides the swing radius outside.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. 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. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. 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. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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.

Everything on an island is fed from underneath, extraction, a socket run, a hob and sometimes a waste, and each of them wants its hole before the top is bonded down. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Where the front curves, the shelf below it curves with it. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. A shadow gap solves what a scribe cannot. Confirm the edge profile and which faces receive it, and tell us whether a screen, hatch or gate forms part of the counter before the carcass is built. A quartz sample left on the counter for a week under the actual kitchen lights settles more arguments than any showroom, and an owner is the only person in a position to do that. 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 operator uses the counter; the owner pays for it.

The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Where the hall runs straight through to the back the piece can be walked in flat, and it is only the two door frames that have to be cleared. 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. A goods lift diagonal belongs on the counter drawing.

The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Retrofitted underfloor heating goes into the new part of the floor and stops at the old part, so the build-up changes partway across the room. 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. A counter is measured in the lobby it will stand in.

If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. 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. The apertures for cable and card readers are what changes between one desk and the next, and every change is a fresh drawing rather than a variation. A phased fit-out gets phased templating, one lobby at a time.