Reception counters and desks in Manor House

Yes. Manor House is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N4. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. 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. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The outrigger shares a party wall with the addition next door for its whole length, so one long side of the kitchen is solid brick with another kitchen on the far side 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. A stair off the pavement caps what can be turned onto the landing. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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.

Where only one car serves the building a breakdown on the morning halts the job outright, so the fallback route is worked out at template rather than on the landing. 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. A counter piece walked in on edge needs the headroom checked too. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on 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 really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. Replacing one plot years after handover is the problem nobody plans for, because a quartz colour can be reordered and a granite block cannot. 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. New-build kitchens are usually smaller than the plan suggests once the appliances are in, so the usable run is shorter than the drawn run. 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. One visit, because a lobby cannot be closed twice.

Older houses put the boiler or the meter on one of the two walls, and whatever is boxed in around it sets the point where that run has to stop. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. The low shelf is drawn to the counter above it, not to the wall. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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. 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 stays when the tenant goes, and is chosen accordingly.

An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. 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.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Packaging leaves with us rather than filling the lobby.

Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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.

Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. 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. A join in the shelf and a join in the top belong in one place.