Restaurant and cafe table tops in Biggin Hill

Yes. Biggin Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TN16. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. A step up from the drive to the threshold turns the last two metres into a lift, and a lift is where two pairs of hands become the minimum. 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. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

The floor is a solid slab with a screed over it, which is stable underfoot and rarely flat across a long run. 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. Chair backs do more damage than plates ever do. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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 short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. 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 cellar stair is not a route for stone. Where the van cannot turn on the plot it has to arrive already facing the right way, so the approach along the street is part of the plan. 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 bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement. 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. 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. Sizes are frozen before machining rather than during it. 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. A second site is quoted from the same specification.

An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. 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. The largest blank is nested first and the rest around it. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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. 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. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. 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. Dilapidations do not reach what was never fixed down.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. Tops travel upright in a frame, faces apart.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. 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. Somewhere to stand the frames matters more than the distance.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. 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. A poseur height changes the base and not the blank.

What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. 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. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Nothing is trimmed on site to make it fit.