Reception counters and desks in Tooting Bec

Yes. Tooting Bec is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW17. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. The counter comes off the van first and goes in last. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The original larder or store cupboard usually survives in a corner, and that alcove is deeper than the units and squarer than the walls around it. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow deep unit off a parade, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. Old shopfronts were never sized for a three-metre top. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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 narrow entrance hall with a turn into the back of the house caps the longest piece we can physically get in, whatever the run itself measures. 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. The counter is sized to the way in before it is sized to the slab. A suspension is charged by the bay and by the day, so the number of metres asked for is worth getting right the first time. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. A booked bay costs less than an hour of a crew standing still.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication 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. 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. The knee recess is not a variable between sites. 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 counter in a working building is an evening job.

Waterfall ends are cut in sequence off the length either side of the top so the vein carries down the leg, and that sequence is gone the moment a piece has to be recut. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. Where the counter turns, the pattern turns with it. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

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. 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. 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. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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. Whoever signs it inherits the join positions with it.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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.

A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. The kitchen normally sits in the back addition or a later side return, which puts the run against the oldest and least straight wall in the building. 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. Every counter starts with the joiner finishing.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. Where the floor falls away across a lobby the carcass is packed level first, because the top cannot correct anything sitting under it. A lobby floor that falls is packed out under the joinery.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Everything on an island is fed from underneath, extraction, a socket run, a hob and sometimes a waste, and each of them wants its hole before the top is bonded down. 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. Support positions go on the drawing before the top is nested.