Restaurant and cafe table tops in Brick Lane

Yes. Brick Lane is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E1. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

A flat over a shop is reached by a separate street door and a straight steep stair, and that stair is the whole access question. A whole slab still gets reserved, because a dozen matching tops is the entire point of ordering them together. What the unit was before decides what it needs now. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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.

Where the stairwell is narrow enough that the stone travels on edge the polished face runs within an inch of the plaster, so the walls get boarded as well as the steps. 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. Pieces are numbered so none of them is carried twice. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Delivery is booked to the room, not to a half day.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. 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. 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. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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.

A breakfast bar on the outer side is an overhang like any other, and the support under it is sized for people leaning on the end rather than for the weight of the stone alone. 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. The count per slab is worked before a figure is given. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. Nothing is trimmed on site to make it fit. Bring in one base, or send the maker’s plate drawing, and tell us the table count including any spares you want to hold back. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. 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. A managed building wants notice and it gets notice.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. The units below stay exactly as they are; only the surface is replaced. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. Empty frames go back on the van the same trip.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. 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. A long communal piece is a slab-length question.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. A boiler hangs on the wall above the run in most of these, and its pipework drops exactly where a splashback wants to go. 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. Thickness is a look and a lifting weight at the same time.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that corner. 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 last thing carried in is the first one set out.