Restaurant and cafe table tops in Colindale

Yes. Colindale is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW9. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. 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. A suspension costs less than a lost fit-out morning. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

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. The trade in this stock is a row of units under a block: a roller shutter, a shallow room behind it and a paved forecourt in front with bollards across the approach. Old floors fall away and the feet take it up. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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. A thin top over a wide plate wants a pad underneath.

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. The last thing carried in is the first one set out. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Pieces are staged inside before the van is moved off.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. Match it now or hunt for it later. 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. 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 trial piece before a large order is money well spent.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. 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 blank decides the diameter, not the other way round. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. 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. Uneven flags outside are why outdoor feet adjust. 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. A short term does not justify a surface that fails early.

Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. 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. The pavement stays walkable while the frames come off.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. 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. Mixed sizes are fine; unplanned mixed sizes are not.

Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Floors are a sand and cement screed over concrete, laid fast and worn since, so they are hard, solid and seldom flat. 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. Chosen for service, not for the photographs on opening night.

The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Money does not move until the template is done. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Textured ceiling coatings and old floor tiles in this stock predate 2000, so nothing is scraped, sanded or lifted before anyone knows what it is. 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. A true circle comes off a machine and never off a hand.