Reception counters and desks in Longford

Yes. Longford is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are UB7. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hillingdon. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. A frontage with no stopping is a fitting slot, not a fitting day. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Cottage terraces have no hall to speak of and the front door opens almost straight into the room, which makes the carry easier and the protection harder. 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. Clinic counters carry a card reader and a screen at the low level. An intruding steel column, a brick pier or a downstand breaks a run that would otherwise have been one clean piece. 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 carcass is levelled before the top is ever offered up.

The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. 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. Nothing is carried through a reception still taking visitors. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Crew size follows the distance from the van to the lobby.

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 installation and worktop fabrication. 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. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. The joiner has to finish before we are able to start. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Reception work is booked around the building staying open.

A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. The low shelf is drawn to the counter above it, not to the wall. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Where a column lands in the run the template plots its actual outline so the stone is cut to fit around it rather than stopped short and filled. 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 shelf over a knee recess cannot be packed, so it is cut true. 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. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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. A landlord's shell and a tenant's desk are two separate briefs.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Floors are suspended timber over a shallow void and have moved, so the units are packed and levelled before anything is set on them. 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 lobby was finished by somebody else, and the counter joins it.

The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. 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 sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Exposed structure means the back edge is not a straight line at all, and a scribe of fifteen or twenty millimetres across a run is normal. Where the floor falls away across a lobby the carcass is packed level first, because the top cannot correct anything sitting under it. The back return follows the wall as the wall leans.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. 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. Overhang at the public face is agreed before the carcass is built.