Reception counters and desks in Pollards Hill

Yes. Pollards Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW16, CR4. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. An early slot buys an empty street and an empty lobby at once. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The gas enters at the back of the house and the pipe to the hob crosses the room at low level in a boxing along the skirting. These are the counters where the lower transaction shelf earns its keep, because the people served at it are the people the standard was written for, so the knee space and the clear approach to it are checked on site rather than taken off a drawing. Clinic counters carry a card reader and a screen at the low level. A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. 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.

Every internal doorway on the way through is another frame to clear, and internal doors come off their hinges rather than being propped open. 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. The counter waits on the van until there is somewhere to stand it. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Waiting time on a counter job is the most expensive hour of it.

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 installation 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 worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. One visit, because a lobby cannot be closed twice. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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. One counter, one drawing, and no second bite at it.

One leg of an L is nearly always the working run and the other little more than a landing space, but both are templated, cut and edged to the same standard. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. A join in the shelf and a join in the top belong in one place. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Dot-and-dab plasterboard sounds solid and is hollow behind, so anything fixed through it has to hit a dab or a batten rather than a void. 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. Tell us the hours the building can be worked in and whether the lobby stays open, and send photographs of every corner so we can find the ducts before we draw. A leaseholder paying for their own kitchen inside managed stock still needs the freeholder to consent, and that consent is about the building and the common parts rather than about the worktop. 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.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Door openings and the hall were set to a generous standard, so a long piece turns in from the front without being stood on end to do it. Estates of this kind carry the buildings that serve them: a housing office, a health centre, a community hall, and every one has a counter the public queues at. The lobby was finished by somebody else, and the counter joins it.

The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. A pendant light hanging in the middle of a hall ceiling sets the angle a piece can be tilted to, and it is the measurement nobody thinks to take. A lobby is one of the few places a piece can be staged, so the counter comes in early and stands on trestles until the carcass is ready for it. Two heights means two carries, and the low one is not the difficult one.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Taped internal angles in plasterboard belly at the corner, so the run picks up a few millimetres over the last 300mm and a plan-angle mitre will not close. 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.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. 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 front edge is the one everybody touches, so it is drawn first.