Restaurant and cafe table tops in Alibon

Yes. Alibon is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM10. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than 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. Counted off at the tail lift where the standing is short. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Deck access means a long open walkway from the lift or the stair to the front door, and that walk happens with the piece on edge in whatever weather there is. That forecourt is the carry, and it is longer than it looks, so the pieces travel the last stretch on a trolley in a frame rather than being walked in by hand. A narrow frontage is a small diameter, honestly stated. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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. An awkward corner takes a made shape.

A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that corner. 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. A lift takes a loaded frame or it takes nothing. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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 van stays until the last piece is on its base.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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. The batch reference goes on file with the drawing. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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. Repeat work is quoted against the original, not from scratch.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. 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. Colour is matched across the room, not table by table. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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. Feet are wound out where the floor falls away. Tell us how close a van can get to the door, and whether the tables have to be moved regularly, since that decides the thickness before anything else does. Where a landlord or housing provider is involved there is a specification to meet and a process to follow, and both are settled before a date is offered. 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.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. Where a floor falls away, the levelling is done by winding out the feet under each base rather than by packing anything under the stone. The base carries the weight and the floor carries the base.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. A maisonette puts the kitchen on one of two levels, so an internal staircase may be part of the route as well as the communal one. The trade in this stock is a row of units under a block, usually a roller shutter with a shallow room behind it. Pavement covers take their own specification.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. Rounds waste the corners of their blank where squares do not, so the mix of shapes moves the slab count more than the number of covers does. Veining is laid out so no two pieces read as a pair.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. Where a servery run forces a join, the tables never carry one, because a table top is a single piece of stone or it is not a table top. A spare comes off the same run or it is not a spare.