Restaurant and cafe table tops in Chelsea Harbour

Yes. Chelsea Harbour is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. 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. Empty frames go back on the van the same trip. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

A refuse chute or a service duct takes a corner of the kitchen in several of the standard plans, and neither of them moves. That forecourt is the carry, and it is longer than it looks, so the pieces travel the last stretch on a trolley in a frame rather than being walked in by hand. A loading bay is the easiest delivery there is. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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.

Pieces get staged in the ground floor lobby and sent up singly, which needs somewhere to stand them where nobody will walk into them. 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. 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 suspension costs less than a lost fit-out morning.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. 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. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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 refit is a resurface where the pedestals are sound. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. 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. One set of decisions, repeated across the whole room.

Three stools along one side need more clear length than most plans allow, and once the seating depth is fixed the piece either grows or it loses a seat. 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. Every dimension quoted is a finished dimension. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

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. 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. Tell us how close a van can get to the door, and whether the tables have to be moved regularly, since that decides the thickness before anything else does. 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. 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. Ten years of service is a different specification entirely.

A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. A tower block runs one or two lifts for many floors, so a lift out of service postpones a job rather than making it harder. Bollards and a paved forecourt keep a van further from the door than a map suggests, so the pieces travel the last stretch on a trolley. The room is handed back laid up, whatever the building.

Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. The step and the gap at the car threshold catch a trolley wheel, so the piece comes off the trolley and goes in by hand. 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.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. 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. 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. A pedestal is checked for spread before a size is agreed.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. 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. The seating plan is priced as a list of pieces.