Reception counters and desks in Friern Barnet

Yes. Friern Barnet is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N11. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. 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.

Rear rooms of this date have a wide sash or a pair of garden doors, so a good deal of the wall the run wants is glass. 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. Nurseries want a hatch, and the hatch is on the same drawing. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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. The public face is the face that has to be right.

A height barrier on the car park entrance rules out a tail-lift van outright, and the stone then transfers to a trolley at the barrier itself. 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. The way in is walked with the joiner as well as with a tape. A bay suspension carries a fee and a notice period, and the notice period is the part that catches people out when a date moves. 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.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop installation. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. 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. 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. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. 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. Nothing is cut until the joinery has been signed off.

Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. A curved front is a waterjet job and a carcass problem both. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. A counter set to the wall instead of to itself will show it. 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. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. 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 drawing is signed by whoever is paying for it.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Internal walls are lath on timber studs while the flank walls are brick, so two walls in the same kitchen take a fixing completely differently. 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 building stays open, so the counter goes in after hours.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. 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. A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. External corners on a counter are mitred, never butted.

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. 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. A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. Where the floor falls away across a lobby the carcass is packed level first, because the top cannot correct anything sitting under it. A packer belongs under the joinery, never under the counter.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Where a run finishes hard against a wall the last few millimetres are scribed, and where it finishes in open floor it is cut square and polished, which is two different jobs on one length. 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 knee recess removes the leg the span was relying on.