Reception counters and desks in Raynes Park

Yes. Raynes Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW20. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Waiting time on a counter job is the most expensive hour of it. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Original quarry-tiled floors sit lower than a later screed, so a run crossing that junction needs the units packed to one level. Practices in this stock are usually converted houses on or behind an interwar parade: a dental surgery, a veterinary practice or a small office with its reception in what was the front room. Concierge desks work as a post room and a security point at once. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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. The back return follows the wall as the wall leans.

A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. 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. Two heights means two carries, and the low one is not the difficult one. A shared drive is only useful if the neighbour is not the one parked behind the van, so we ask which side the standing belongs to before the date is set. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. The counter comes off the van first and goes in last.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. 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. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. Where the lobby stays open, the work runs outside opening hours. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. A spare offcut kept back can save a whole counter later.

Corner sinks and corner hobs sit exactly where the joint wants to be, so on an L the cut-out positions get settled before the join positions do. 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.

An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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. Column casings take machined returns, not filler. Confirm whether the reception is at ground level or up the stair, and send the carcass drawing with the chimney breast and any bay recorded on it. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. 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.

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. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. What is out of true gets measured, not talked around.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. 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. 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.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Where the side return has been filled in, one side of the new room is old brick and the other is new blockwork, and the two do not behave alike. 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. The drawing follows the carcass; the carcass does not follow the drawing.

Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. The kitchen sits at the rear with a door to the garden and a window over the sink, so the useful run is broken into two short lengths. The carcass is built around a chimney breast or into a bay, so the counter is drawn to a shape the joiner had to invent rather than to a rectangle, and the return between the upper counter and the transaction shelf rarely nests neatly against the long piece. A stair off the pavement caps what can be turned onto the landing.