Restaurant and cafe table tops in Castle Green

Yes. Castle Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM9, IG11. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. 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 bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen sits at the rear with a door to the garden and a window over the sink, so the useful run is broken into two short lengths. Parades of this period usually keep a service road or a yard behind them, so a full order can arrive at the back and the dining room stays laid up while it does. A goods lift takes a frame and saves a morning. A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. 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. Nothing is scribed, because nothing meets a wall.

Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. 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.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. 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. 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. What one room learns, the next room uses. 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. 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. Turnover between operators rarely changes the pedestals.

A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. 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. Cut from the same run as the counter, so the room agrees. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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. Levelled at the feet, never packed under the stone. Confirm how many covers go outside, and tell us whether the outdoor bases share the pattern of the indoor ones, since they often do not. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. 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. Specified for the term, not for a decade by default.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The chimney breast in the kitchen once took a copper or a back boiler, and whatever is left of it is rarely square to the rest of the room. 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 underside matters, because a hand goes under every edge.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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. A dozen pieces is a dozen carries, not one lift.

Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. These were built in short runs of six or eight houses, so the party walls are solid brick and the rear elevation is a straight line with no outriggers. The units are wider than an older shopfront, which is what makes a long wall of two-seaters work, and a repeated size is the single cheapest decision on the order because it nests tightly and makes a spare piece worth holding. Chair backs do more damage than plates ever do.

Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. The under-stair cupboard opens off the kitchen in most of them, and its door swing is the reason a corner run stops where it does. Parades of this period usually keep a service yard behind them, so tops and bases arrive at the back and the dining room stays laid up while they do. Old floors fall away and the feet take it up.