Reception counters and desks in St Mary Cray

Yes. St Mary Cray is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR5. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. 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. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Where the goods entrance is round the back, the carry is priced from there. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

A maisonette puts the kitchen on one of two levels, so an internal staircase may be part of the route as well as the communal one. Estates of this kind carry the buildings that serve them, and every one has a counter the public queues at: a housing office, a health centre, a community hall, a library. Where the hall is tall, the light finds every seam in the counter. Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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 counter standing proud of the wall has nothing to hide behind.

Counting hands matters more than counting metres on a staircase, because a piece two people lift off a van still wants three on the flight and a fourth watching the trailing corner. 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. Working out of hours costs less than a chipped counter does. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. An early slot buys an empty street and an empty lobby at once.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands 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. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. 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. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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 weekend fit is planned as a weekend fit from the outset.

A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Support positions go on the drawing before the top is nested. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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 carcass is levelled before the top is ever offered up. 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. Access in a tenanted flat depends on the tenant, so the template and fitting dates are agreed with whoever actually holds the keys. 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. Dilapidations decide more counter specifications than taste does.

An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. A shelf over a knee recess cannot be packed, so it is cut true.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. The internal stair is usually a straight flight with a tight top landing, and it is the landing rather than the flight that is the limit. 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. Housing office counters get cleaned harder than they get used.

Carcasses stay. Surface changes. That is the whole of it. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Waiting time on a counter job is the most expensive hour of it.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. A shallow shelf still needs a support run of its own.