Reception counters and desks in Penge

Yes. Penge is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE20. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. 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. Trolleys cross block paving badly, so boards go down first. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Where the kitchen has taken the bay, the end of the room is three facets of glass set at angles and there is no straight wall left to finish against. 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. The building stays open, so the counter goes in after hours. 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. 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. What the joiner left behind is what the templater records.

A front path with a gate and a turn or two adds handling before the door is even reached, and every handling movement is another chance to catch a corner. 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 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. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. One space, one visit, and the counter goes in whole.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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 kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. Apertures change from desk to desk, so each drawing is its own. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. A weekend fit is planned as a weekend fit from the outset.

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. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. The front edge is the one everybody touches, so it is drawn first. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

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. 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 bowed lobby wall is a scribe, and a scribe takes hours. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. Where a managing agent has to approve the work, the drawing goes out in a form they can sign without ever standing in the lobby. Somebody has to book the lift, and it is rarely the receptionist.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. Where the floor falls away across a lobby the carcass is packed level first, because the top cannot correct anything sitting under it. The counter is scribed to the carcass, and the carcass to the floor.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. 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. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. Setting out starts at the entrance end and works inward.

Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. The knee recess makes any twist in the carcass visible, since a shelf with nothing beneath it has nowhere for a packer to go. A counter standing proud of the wall has nothing to hide behind.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Cornice runs round the head of the wall, so the wall units stop under it and the splashback band is trapped between two things that are not going to move. 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. The building around the lobby decides the counter more than the brief does.