Restaurant and cafe table tops in Brentham Garden Suburb

Yes. Brentham Garden Suburb is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W5. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Ealing. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. 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 bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Cottage terraces have no hall to speak of and the front door opens almost straight into the room, which makes the carry easier and the protection harder. The trade on streets like these sits in a parade of narrow shopfronts, so the dining room is long and thin and the covers are won by the width of the gangway rather than by the size of the room. A high ceiling wants a thicker edge under it. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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. Every piece is offered up to its own pedestal.

The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. 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. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. 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.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. 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. 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. A second site is quoted from the same specification. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. Held stock is worth more than a discount.

Where a run finishes hard against a wall the last few millimetres are scribed, and where it finishes in open floor it is cut square and polished, which is two different jobs on one length. 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. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. 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 staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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. A managed building wants notice and it gets notice.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Floors are suspended timber over a shallow void and have moved, so the units are packed and levelled before anything is set on them. 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. Long hours push the choice towards a harder face.

The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Injected damp courses and re-rendered lower walls leave the bottom metre standing proud of everything above it. 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. Base spread against top size is checked before a size is agreed.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. What the room does to the base matters more than the wall.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. A doorway partway along one wall breaks that side into two separate pieces, and two short pieces cost more between them than the single long one they replace. 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. Cut from the same run as the counter, so the room agrees.