Reception counters and desks in St Paul's Cray

Yes. St Paul's 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. 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. 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. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Low-rise blocks are three or four storeys with a single stair and no lift, so pieces go up on edge and the half-landing sets the maximum length. 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. The lobby was finished by somebody else, and the counter joins it. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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 template is taken to the carcass as built.

Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. 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. Every re-grip near a finished front edge is planned out beforehand. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. 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.

Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. 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.

Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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. Twist in a carcass shows first at the transaction shelf. 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 is arranged through a managing agent or a scheme office rather than with the household directly, so a date gets confirmed once in writing and moving it costs a fortnight. 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. A desk in a re-let space is specified for the next occupier too.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. A long counter magnifies every millimetre the carcass is out.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Walls are dense in-situ concrete or blockwork with a thin skim, which will not be chased back and will not take a plasterboard fixing. 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. A parade unit is entered up a step nobody thought to measure.

If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. 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. Fit-out programmes slip toward the counter, never away from it.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. 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.