Restaurant and cafe table tops in Canada Water

Yes. Canada Water is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE16. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Building management is often the real gate rather than the bay itself, since the barrier, the shutter and the lift each need someone with a fob. 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 plan on the van matches the plan on the floor. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen and the dining space share one room front to back, with the stair enclosure taking a bite out of one side of it. The commercial space in a new block is a ground-floor unit with a service bay or a loading door behind it, and that is the most straightforward delivery a table order gets: a level threshold, a flat floor and a goods lift where the unit runs over more than one level. Terraces and gardens live outdoors all year. 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. 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. Feet are wound out where the floor falls away.

Lift doors close on a timer that takes no account of somebody holding a worktop, so a pair of hands stays on the buttons at each end. 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. Tops travel upright in a frame, faces apart. Time-limited bays are camera-enforced across a lot of managed estates, so the unload runs to the clock and the van moves off afterwards. 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. A long push from the kerb is planned, not discovered.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop installation. 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. 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 trial piece before a large order is money well spent. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Orders are counted in pieces and never in metres.

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. 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 spare comes off the same run or it is not a spare. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

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. 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. The base carries the weight and the floor carries the base. Send the fit-out drawing with final table positions and sizes, the base specification, and the delivery window the managing agent is prepared to accept. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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 brand standard is followed to the letter or not at all.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The room is square, the walls are plumb and the floor is flat, so almost every complication in the job belongs to the building rather than the kitchen. 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. The stone is straightforward and the base fixing is the job.

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. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Plasterboard partitions mean light scribes and clean joins, and the fabrication effort moves to the visible faces instead. What a table top needs from us is a size, a shape and the base plate it has to be drilled to, and very little else. Sizes agreed on paper before any slab is committed.

Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. A shallow room decides the diameter early.

It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Windows are small and set to suit the elevation rather than the room, so most of the wall above the worktop is solid. The commercial space in a block like this is a ground-floor unit with a service bay behind it, which is the easiest delivery a table order ever gets. Converted houses mean several sizes, not one.