Reception counters and desks in Whitton

Yes. Whitton is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW2. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hounslow. Where an event closes the road entirely, the van cannot be moved once it is in, which is a different problem from not being able to park at all. 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. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The stack serving the bathroom above comes down the rear elevation in cast iron, and its branch settles where a sink waste can reasonably be picked up. Practices in this stock are usually converted houses on or behind an interwar parade: a dental surgery, a veterinary practice or a small office with its reception in what was the front room. The service road at the back is often the real way in. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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 van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. 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. Suction pads want a clean dry face, and lobby dust is not that. 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. Waiting time on a counter job is the most expensive hour of it.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop design & quotation and worktop templating. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. 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. 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. One counter, one drawing, and no second bite at it. 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. 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.

It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. 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. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. 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. Confirm whether the reception is at ground level or up the stair, and send the carcass drawing with the chimney breast and any bay recorded on it. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. 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. The serving height comes from the standard, not from the landlord.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. 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.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. Where the front is curved the top is cut on a waterjet, and the carcass has to be built to the same radius rather than close to it. Nothing is drawn square that the carcass did not build square.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. The pantry was a half-brick enclosure in the corner of the room, and where it has been taken out the wall behind it is made good brickwork rather than original plaster. Districts built out between the wars have parades of their own, and the practices in them run to a counter with a waiting room behind it and a filing run under the shelf. A pharmacy counter is two heights before anybody draws it.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. A lobby is one of the few places a piece can be staged, so the counter comes in early and stands on trestles until the carcass is ready for it. The counter waits on the van until there is somewhere to stand it.