Restaurant and cafe table tops in Coombe (Croydon)

Yes. Coombe (Croydon) is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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 clock on the kerb changes the order of unloading. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These houses are three storeys on a small footprint, so the kitchen is on the ground floor and everything else is stacked above it. The complication is the programme rather than the building. Chair backs do more damage than plates ever do. A partition that gives when you lean on it will give under someone sitting at an overhang, and a bonded mitre nearby is where that movement shows first. 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. What the room does to the base matters more than the wall.

Concierge buildings want the goods entrance, a booked lift and proof of insurance, all of which is straightforward when it is asked for a week out. 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. Bases go in first and tops go in last. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Counted off at the tail lift where the standing is short.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. Replacing one plot years after handover is the problem nobody plans for, because a quartz colour can be reordered and a granite block cannot. 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. Ordered as a set, so the set matches. New-build kitchens are usually smaller than the plan suggests once the appliances are in, so the usable run is shorter than the drawn run. 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 second room is easier to match if it is mentioned now.

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. 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. The seating plan is priced as a list of pieces. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where a peninsula returns into a stud wall the load has to sit on the units, with the wall doing no more than steadying it. 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 thin top over a wide plate wants a pad underneath. 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 short term does not justify a surface that fails early.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Riser panels, wall boxes and the boiler cupboard sit in fixed positions the developer will not move for a worktop. 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. Corners eased, since chair backs find them first.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. 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. Sizes settle the yield before the shape does.

Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Buyers upgrading before handover work to a choices deadline set by the sales office rather than by the build programme. 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. Spares are cheap while the run is still on the ground.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. Bollards, planters and a one-way service road can turn what looks like a ten-metre carry into a fifty-metre one. 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. Nothing is stacked flat on a dining room floor.