Restaurant and cafe table tops in Blackhorse Lane

Yes. Blackhorse Lane is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E17. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Waltham Forest. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. 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 quiet hour is worth more to us than a close bay. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Windows are large industrial openings with deep sills, and a run finishing at one meets a reveal a full brick deep. The delivery is straightforward by comparison, since a goods lift and a loading door will take a full frame and a whole floor can be staged in one movement. Chair backs do more damage than plates ever do. A brick pier standing into the run divides it in two, and the join goes against the pier where a clear wall would have needed no join at all. 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 column in the room is designed around, not cut around.

Where the lift will not take the longest run we design a join in rather than gamble, because a piece that will not go up has to go back on the van. 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. Handling is where a polished edge gets damaged. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Nothing is left on a pavement while a space is found.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop fabrication. 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. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. 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. A poseur height changes the base and not the blank. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Where the structure cannot be cut into, the stone is relieved instead, and a relief that deep changes both the yield off the slab and how the piece is handled. 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. Banquette seating wants a cantilever foot under it. Give us the communal table length and the base positions along it, and confirm the goods lift dimensions so the frames can be sized to the car. Where a letting agent sits between us and the owner the approval passes through two sets of hands, so a quote has to be clear enough to forward without a covering explanation. 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. Specified for the term, not for a decade by default.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. An intruding steel column, a brick pier or a downstand breaks a run that would otherwise have been one clean piece. 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. A rocking table is a floor problem and not a stone one.

The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Where a column lands in the run the template plots its actual outline so the stone is cut to fit around it rather than stopped short and filled. The measurement that governs everything here is the gangway, because it caps the diameter before anybody has chosen a colour. The gangway is a measurement rather than an impression.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. An island carries its own edge detail all the way round, so a mitred 100mm apron on four sides is four mitres cut, bonded and polished before the piece ever leaves the bench. 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. Squares off one slab and rounds off another, where that is cheaper.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Services run on the surface in these buildings, so conduit and pipework cross the wall behind the units and stand proud of it. The units here are large and open, which is where the long communal table appears, and a long top is a two-piece decision rather than a one-piece one. Old floors fall away and the feet take it up.