Reception counters and desks in White Hart Lane

Yes. White Hart Lane is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N17. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Haringey. A market day closes the street to traffic for the morning and hands it back in the afternoon, which moves the visit rather than cancelling it. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Where the goods entrance is round the back, the carry is priced from there. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A two-up two-down has a kitchen that was never designed to be one, so the run is short, the ceiling is low and every millimetre of depth gets argued over. 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. Nurseries want a hatch, and the hatch is on the same drawing. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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 scribe is cut in the shop, eased on site, and no further.

Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. 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. Lobby floors are boarded before the first piece comes off the trolley. A timed school street shuts the road either side of the school day, so the van goes in between those two windows or it does not go in. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. An early slot buys an empty street and an empty lobby at once.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. 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. One counter, one drawing, and no second bite at it. 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. Several desks off one slab run, or they will not match.

The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. The counter shape follows the queue first and the slab second. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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. Stone will not straighten joinery, and it will not forgive it either. 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. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. 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 short lease buys a different counter from a long one.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. An event-day suspension can override a bay that is perfectly usable the rest of the week, so a booked space gets checked again nearer the time. A reception fit is often booked outside opening hours precisely because that is when the kerb in front of the building is free. Waiting time on a counter job is the most expensive hour of it.

What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. The front edge runs straight whatever the wall behind it does.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Ground floors fall away towards the garden across the whole footprint, so the units are packed up long before anything is measured for stone. 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 top has no wall behind it to hide a poor edge.

It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Cottage terraces have no hall to speak of and the front door opens almost straight into the room, which makes the carry easier and the protection harder. That entrance is what caps the counter, because a shopfront door and the step in front of it will take far less than a full-length top, so the run is broken over a support in the carcass rather than gambled on. The building stays open, so the counter goes in after hours.