Reception counters and desks in Old Ford

Yes. Old Ford is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E3. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Service yards want a name and a time, given a week out. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A semi has a side passage, and whether it is wide enough to carry a piece flat and turn it in at the back door is the first thing worth measuring. 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 pharmacy counter is two heights before anybody draws it. Casement handles and stays swing down into the space above the worktop, so the clearance that counts is the one measured with the window open. 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. A counter standing proud of the wall has nothing to hide behind.

Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. 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. Suction pads want a clean dry face, and lobby dust is not that. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. The counter is unwrapped inside the building, never at the kerb.

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 design & quotation. 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. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. Two desks on one site still take two templates. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. Matching across sites means matching blocks, not matching names.

Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. 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. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. The carcass is levelled before the top is ever offered up. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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. Somebody has to book the lift, and it is rarely the receptionist.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. Where the floor falls away across a lobby the carcass is packed level first, because the top cannot correct anything sitting under it. A shelf over a knee recess cannot be packed, so it is cut true.

Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. 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. The counter waits on the van until there is somewhere to stand it.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Chimney breasts are often taken out at ground level and left standing above, so the middle of the run is newer wall than the two ends of it. 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. Two heights and a return, settled before any stone is cut.

If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. The counter is quoted with the programme written beside it.