Restaurant and cafe table tops in Abbey Wood

Yes. Abbey Wood is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE2. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. The bay is booked against the fitting date, not the week. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The incoming main and the stopcock come up through the floor at the old scullery wall, so whatever unit stands over them has to stay removable. Parades of this period usually keep a service road or a yard behind them, so a full order can arrive at the back and the dining room stays laid up while it does. A basement is for prep and not for storing 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. None of that is scribed against on a table, since it stands clear of every wall, so the awkwardness moves from the back edge to the floor and the base. Uneven flags outside are why outdoor feet adjust.

A loading bay or a red route puts a clock on the unload, so the pieces come off in the order they will be fitted rather than the order they were loaded. A table order is many small pieces rather than one long one, so the route decides how many trips the delivery takes rather than how big anything can be. Handling is where a polished edge gets damaged. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. Where the standing is short the pieces are counted off at the tail lift against the plan rather than checked once they are already inside. The unload is timed between service, never through 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. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Table work arrives as a batch by its nature, and a batch means one slab run rather than the same colour ordered twice a year apart. A breakage next winter is a phone call, not a problem. 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 room opening in a second phase is worth naming now, while the material is still on the ground and a match is a telephone call. Volume moves the price per piece, and it should.

A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. A table top answers to none of that, since it meets no wall and needs no scribe, but the pieces come off the same slab as the counter and the colour has to carry across both. What a counter leaves behind is worth designing for. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. A column, a boxed duct or a fixed bench in a dining room is designed around with a shape cut to suit rather than notched on site. The clearance under a fixed shelf is measured, not assumed. Confirm how many covers go outside, and tell us whether the outdoor bases share the pattern of the indoor ones, since they often do not. A leaseholder paying for their own kitchen inside managed stock still needs the freeholder to consent, and that consent is about the building and the common parts rather than about the worktop. A table top bolted to a base you already own is loose furniture rather than a fixture, so it leaves with the operator at the end of a term. A managed building wants notice and it gets notice.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. What decides the cut list here is the seating plan rather than the room shape, and one repeated table size nests far better than six one-offs. The largest blank is nested first and the rest around it.

Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Nothing is payable in advance of the template. A serving hatch through to the dining room is common, and closing one up leaves a panel of newer wall exactly where the run passes. Table tops sit outside all of that, because a top touches no wall at all and every one of its edges is profiled, polished and on show. Thickness is a look and a lifting weight at the same time.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. The rear wall now carries french or folding doors across most of its width, so a whole side of the room opens and a long piece comes straight in off the garden. Parades of this period usually keep a service yard behind them, so tops and bases arrive at the back and the dining room stays laid up while they do. Terraces and gardens live outdoors all year.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. The chimney breast in the kitchen once took a copper or a back boiler, and whatever is left of it is rarely square to the rest of the room. What a table top needs from us is a size, a shape and the base plate it has to be drilled to, and very little else. Nothing is drilled in your dining room.