Restaurant and cafe table tops in Addington

Yes. Addington is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. 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. A table order comes off the van as a stack of frames and a pallet of bases, and both of those need somewhere to stand before either is moved. The bay is booked against the fitting date, not the week. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Post-war terraces have a short straight hall to the kitchen, which is a good deal kinder than the houses they replaced. Trade in this stock is a single shopfront with a small room behind it, so an order is a dozen pieces rather than fifty, and that changes what is worth doing rather than how it is done. A basement is for prep and not for storing stone. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. 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 carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. 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. The turn is measured for the frame, not for a person. On a drive that only takes one vehicle nose-in, the van has to reverse the whole length of it to get back out, which decides which way it goes in. 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 unload is timed between service, never through it.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop design & quotation. 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. Where several adults share the cooking the kitchen is in use most of the day, so a fitting slot has to be agreed with more people than usual. 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. Lead time is the reason the date is set early. Households sharing a house tend to want two prep areas rather than one, which usually means an island as well as a perimeter run. 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. A breakage next winter is a phone call, not a problem.

Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. 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. Every dimension quoted is a finished dimension. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. 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. Bring in one base, or send the maker’s plate drawing, and tell us the table count including any spares you want to hold back. 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. The length of the lease is a legitimate reason to specify differently, and nobody should be talked into a decade of surface for five years of trading. Whoever signs off is agreed before machining starts.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Small, roughly square kitchens with a back door and a window in the middle of the run: short lengths, few joins, and a lot to work around. 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. Chosen for service, not for the photographs on opening night.

Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Walls look modern and are not: block or breeze with a skim that has been patched over decades, so dry-laying and scribing still apply. A whole slab still gets reserved, because a dozen matching tops is the entire point of ordering them together. Roller shutters and bollards lengthen the carry.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. The distance from the standing to the actual kitchen door is the number that counts, since plenty of drives finish at a side gate and a garden path. 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. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can.

The workmanship guarantee is the same either way. It does not extend to a material we did not supply. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. A second kitchen or a kitchenette in an annexe is a small job with the same fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines as a large one. A fit-out programme runs to an opening date that does not move, so the sizes are frozen and the slab committed earlier than most jobs need. Volume moves the price per piece, and it should.