Reception counters and desks in Pimlico

Yes. Pimlico is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW1V. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. A suspension is charged by the bay and by the day, so the number of metres asked for is worth getting right the first time. 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. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The partitions put in at conversion are studwork standing on the old floor, so they take a fixing well but carry nothing, and a heavy end panel needs a different answer. 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 around the lobby decides the counter more than the brief does. 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 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 bowed lobby wall is a scribe, and a scribe takes hours.

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. 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. Pieces come in the order the carcass will accept them. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. One space, one visit, and the counter goes in whole.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. A weekend fit is planned as a weekend fit from the outset. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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 repeatable counter needs a repeatable material.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. 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. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

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. 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. The counter is scribed to the carcass, and the carcass to the floor. 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. Consent for the work sits with the freeholder or the managing body, and getting it in writing first avoids a crew arriving to a locked door. 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 agent approves the drawing without leaving the office.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. 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. 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. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. A counter standing proud of the wall has nothing to hide behind.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. 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. Setting out starts at the entrance end and works inward.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. The flat entrance door is a certified fire door on a closer, and taking it off for an hour means dealing with the seals and the closer before the day ends. 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 shopfront door caps the counter length before the slab does.

A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Boxed sash frames swallow a hundred millimetres of wall on each side of the opening, so the wall between a window and a corner is shorter than a plan makes it look. 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. A porter's desk stands on its own carcass, fixed into nothing original.