Reception counters and desks in Fulham

Yes. Fulham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW6. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of the borough. Where the permit is a digital session rather than a paper one, somebody in the house has to start it at the hour the van actually arrives. 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.

The original scullery gully is still live in the yard outside the back door, and new waste from the sink joins a drain laid for a copper and a stone sink. 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. A converted house wants a counter that reads as furniture. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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 handrail that has to come off before a piece will pass is twenty minutes at the start of the day, and it goes back on the wall before we leave. 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. Trestles go up in the lobby before anything is unwrapped. A resident bay and a shared-use bay can sit on the same street under different rules, and it is usually the shared one a visitor permit or a ticket touches. 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 templating, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. 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. 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. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. A counter in a working building is an evening job. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. One visit, because a lobby cannot be closed twice.

Side-return kitchens are long and narrow with one outside wall, and the wall the run sits against is often the oldest, least straight surface in the house. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. A shallow shelf still needs a support run of its own. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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 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. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. The rear door swings inward across the end of the run, so the last few hundred millimetres of worktop are only reachable with the door shut. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow deep unit off a parade, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. Old shopfronts were never sized for a three-metre top.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. A packer belongs under the joinery, never under the counter.

A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Spindles and a newel cap stand proud of the string, so the usable width on a turn is measured to the handrail rather than to the wall behind it. 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 transaction shelf goes almost anywhere the upper top will not.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Sash windows in the addition sit low and the sill can land under standard worktop height, so the top is notched round it or the run stops short of it. A front room converted into a surgery or a salon gives a small lobby and a counter that still has to leave width for people to get past it. The service road at the back is often the real way in.