Reception counters and desks in Streatham

Yes. Streatham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW16. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. A red route puts a clock on a counter that will not be rushed. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The structure below is commercial, so the floor is often timber over a shop ceiling and the load path under an island is worth thinking about. 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. A converted house wants a counter that reads as furniture. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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.

The measurement that decides everything is the diagonal between the underside of the flight above and the outer edge of the turn below it. 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. Working out of hours costs less than a chipped counter does. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Where the bay is booked by the hour, pieces come off in fitting order.

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 installation. 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. 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. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. A phased fit-out gets phased templating, one lobby at a time. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. What the operator needs at the shelf outranks the elevation.

A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. 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 junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. Twist in a carcass shows first at the transaction shelf. 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. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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. Where the freeholder keeps the lobby, the finishes are protected first.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. 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. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. 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. Where the floor falls away across a lobby the carcass is packed level first, because the top cannot correct anything sitting under it. A long counter magnifies every millimetre the carcass is out.

A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. There is no leaning a piece against a wall halfway up, so any flight longer than a dozen treads is planned around a rest point on a landing. 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. A long top on edge sweeps wider than the crew carrying it.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. 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. A counter is measured in the lobby it will stand in.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. An external corner on a counter is seen from both sides at once, so it is mitred rather than butted and the pattern is carried round it. A shallow shelf still needs a support run of its own.