Reception counters and desks in Sudbury

Yes. Sudbury is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA0. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Brent. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. The tail lift needs pavement, not simply a space. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The meters sit in the hall or under the stairs on the way through, so the carry passes a cupboard door that has to be shut and protected before anything moves. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow unit off a high-street parade, entered up a step, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. Public counters are specified for wear at the front edge. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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 shelf over a knee recess cannot be packed, so it is cut true.

A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. 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. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Outside opening hours is usually when the kerb is free.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. What the operator needs at the shelf outranks the elevation.

An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. A shallow shelf still needs a support run of its own. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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 back return follows the wall as the wall leans. Send photographs taken walking from the pavement through the door to where the counter will stand, along with the carcass dimensions once the joiner has fixed it. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. Where a managing agent has to approve the work, the drawing goes out in a form they can sign without ever standing in the lobby. A desk approved in principle is not a desk approved to cut.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. There is usually a step down into the back addition, so the kitchen floor and the hall floor are not the same level and neither of them is flat. 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. Apertures for cable and card reader are machined, never drilled in a lobby.

If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. Column casings take machined returns, not filler.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. The public side and the staff side take different details.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. 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. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. 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. 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. Nothing is drawn square that the carcass did not build square.