Restaurant and cafe table tops in Botany Bay

Yes. Botany Bay is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EN2. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Enfield. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. Nothing is left on a pavement while a space is found. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Ceiling beams cross the room at a height that decides where a piece can be stood on edge and where it cannot. That is fine, but it has to be drawn: a room of one-offs prices differently from a room of repeats, and the difference is real rather than a markup. Frontage, gangway and covers, in that order. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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. The clearance under a fixed shelf is measured, not assumed.

A meter cupboard set into the hall wall narrows the run at exactly the height a carried piece travels. 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. Corners take the knocks, so corners get the padding. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. Delivery is booked to the room, not to a half day.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop templating and worktop installation. 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. 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. A second site is quoted from the same specification. 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. 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. Held stock is worth more than a discount.

An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. 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. One repeated size cuts better than six one-offs. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. Room by room, since no two of them are the same. Send a plan of each room with its table sizes against it, and say which covers are outdoors so the material can be split before anything is priced. Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. 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.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Original solid floors are quarry tile or flagstone bedded on ash, and they have moved with the ground rather than with the building. Table tops sit outside all of that, because a top touches no wall at all and every one of its edges is profiled, polished and on show. Made to the plate you own, so nothing else has to be replaced.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. 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. Cut from the same run as the counter, so the room agrees.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. The carcasses stay. Only the surface changes. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. Empty frames go back on the van the same trip.

The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. The floor is often flags or brick laid straight on the ground, so it is solid, uneven and not going to be levelled by chasing into it. A garden or a terrace comes with most of these, and the outdoor covers are a different specification from the ones standing indoors. Covers decide the count, and the count decides the order.