Restaurant and cafe table tops in Bedford Park

Yes. Bedford Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W4. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hounslow. A suspension is charged by the bay and by the day, so the number of metres asked for is worth getting right the first time. 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 long push from the kerb is planned, not discovered. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Internal walls are lath on timber studs while the flank walls are brick, so two walls in the same kitchen take a fixing completely differently. That measurement comes first: once the gangway is fixed the table dimension follows, and on most of these frontages that means a six hundred millimetre square for two and a seven hundred millimetre round where the room widens towards the back. Pavement covers take their own specification. 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. 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.

A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. 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. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. 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. Frames come off before pallets so the floor stays clear.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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.

A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. 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. Sizes settle the yield before the shape does. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

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. 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. Send the seating plan with the gangway widths marked, and bring in one of the bases or the maker’s drawing so the bolt centres can be measured properly. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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. Written approval before cutting, every time.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. Tops travel upright in a padded frame, and it is the frame rather than the person carrying it that has to clear the tightest turn. The turn is measured for the frame, not for a person.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. 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. One repeated size cuts better than six one-offs.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Many were built with a solid sub-floor to the rear rooms, so the kitchen floor is concrete and level while the front of the house is suspended timber. The commercial frontage on streets like these is a narrow shop with the dining room running back from the pavement, so the tops go in past furniture that is already down. What the parade allows is what the room can seat.

Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Where an operator changes hands the bases usually stay, so a refit becomes a resurface and the saving comes from what is already bolted down. A second site is quoted from the same specification.