Restaurant and cafe table tops in Becontree Heath

Yes. Becontree Heath is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM8, RM10. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. 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. 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 unload is timed between service, never through it. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Rear access through a garden or a shared path means long pieces can usually come in whole from the back. 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. Chair backs do more damage than plates ever do. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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. A step in the floor is a base decision.

Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. 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. Nothing is stacked flat on a dining room floor. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop replacement. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. 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. The programme decides the delivery, not the workshop. 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. Sizes are frozen before machining rather than during it.

Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. 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. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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. Every piece is offered up to its own pedestal. 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. Access is arranged through a managing agent or a scheme office rather than with the household directly, so a date gets confirmed once in writing and moving it costs a fortnight. 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. The invoice and the approval carry the same name.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. 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. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Kitchens in this stock are compact and reasonably square, which makes the fixed lines a larger share of the total than the material is. 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. No wall behind it, so nothing about it is hidden.

Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. Nothing is trimmed on site to make it fit.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. There is nearly always a boxed soil stack or a service riser in a corner of the run, and it is rarely mentioned at enquiry. A dining room orders tops in sets, so the question is never one piece but twenty that have to read as one colour. The base plate settles the drilling before the stone is cut.

A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. 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. 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. A poseur height changes the base and not the blank.