Reception counters and desks in Putney Heath

Yes. Putney Heath is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW15. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. 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. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. The counter is unwrapped inside the building, never at the kerb. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Post-war terraces have a short straight hall to the kitchen, which is a good deal kinder than the houses they replaced. The parades behind terraces of this period carry pharmacies, minicab offices, takeaways and small surgeries, and their counters are the hardest-used stone we fit. Nurseries want a hatch, and the hatch is on the same drawing. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. 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 shelf over a knee recess cannot be packed, so it is cut true.

Goods lifts and passenger lifts fail differently: one has a rated load that matters, the other has a door aperture that matters more. 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 goods lift diagonal belongs on the counter drawing. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. A frontage with no stopping is a fitting slot, not a fitting day.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. The counter is quoted with the programme written beside it. 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. 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. Where the lobby stays open, the work runs outside opening hours.

Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. Overhang at the public face is agreed before the carcass is built. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. The back return follows the wall as the wall leans. Tell us whether there is rear access off a service road, and send the carcass dimensions with the till, terminal and cable positions marked on them. Residents are given written notice before anyone attends, and that notice period rather than the workshop is what governs the earliest sensible start. 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. Whoever holds the keys holds the fitting slot.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Crew size follows the distance from the van to the lobby.

Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Walls look modern and are not: block or breeze with a skim that has been patched over decades, so dry-laying and scribing still apply. A pharmacy counter is two heights before anyone draws it, with a consultation position at the low level and a dispensing side that never meets the public, and the apertures for a card reader and a till sit at the transaction shelf. The building stays open, so the counter goes in after hours.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Units are often only 500mm deep, so a standard 600mm stone top overhangs at the front and the doors need checking against 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. Where the join lands is a sightline question before it is a slab question.

Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. The window sits in the middle of the run over the sink, and its board and cill set the limit on how tall an upstand can be. Terraces from this period sit behind small parades, and the counters there belong to pharmacies, minicab offices and takeaways rather than to lobbies. The building around the lobby decides the counter more than the brief does.