Restaurant and cafe table tops in Coldharbour

Yes. Coldharbour is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE9. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. A suspension costs less than a lost fit-out morning. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Walls are dense block or in-situ concrete with a bonded plaster, so the bottom course of tiles brings plaster with it when the old top comes off. The trade in this stock is a row of units under a block, usually a roller shutter with a shallow room behind it. Frontage, gangway and covers, in that order. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. 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. Weight low, spread wide, and it stays put.

A communal flight is out of use while a piece is on it, so the carry is timed so nobody is trying to pass on a half-landing. 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. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. Pieces are staged inside before the van is moved off.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop templating. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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. One set of decisions, repeated across the whole room. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. 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. Buying twice costs more than buying deep once.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. 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 circle wastes its corners, and the quote says so. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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. A step in the floor is a base decision. 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. Managed stock usually comes with its own rules about working hours, waste, and who is allowed on site. 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. Nothing is ordered against a verbal instruction.

An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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. Every piece is offered up to its own pedestal.

What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A fitted stair carpet is either lifted or covered, because grit trodden into it under work boots does more harm than the carry itself. 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.

Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. 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. A phased opening is planned as a single order.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Many have been extended at the rear since being sold, so the kitchen is half original and half newer with a floor junction between the two. 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. Covers decide the count, and the count decides the order.