Restaurant and cafe table tops in Crouch End

Yes. Crouch End is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N8. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Haringey. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The addition is a brick narrower than the house it hangs off, which leaves a stub of the original rear wall standing square to the run at the doorway end. The trade on streets like these sits in a parade of narrow shopfronts, so the dining room is long and thin and the covers are won by the width of the gangway rather than by the size of the room. A narrow frontage is a small diameter, honestly stated. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing 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. A pedestal is checked for spread before a size is agreed.

Where the stairwell is narrow enough that the stone travels on edge the polished face runs within an inch of the plaster, so the walls get boarded as well as the steps. 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. A dozen pieces is a dozen carries, not one lift. 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. Pieces are staged inside before the van is moved off.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. What one room learns, the next room uses. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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. Turnover between operators rarely changes the pedestals.

The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. 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. Rectangles nest and rounds do not. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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 column in the room is designed around, not cut around. Send the seating plan with the gangway widths marked, and bring in one of the bases or the maker’s drawing so the bolt centres can be measured properly. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. The length of the lease is a legitimate reason to specify differently, and nobody should be talked into a decade of surface for five years of trading. Consistency across sites is a decision, not an accident.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that corner. 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. Bases go in first and tops go in last.

Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Carrying down a flight is not the easier direction, because the weight runs ahead of the crew and whoever is at the bottom has no way of stopping a slip. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. Nothing is stacked flat on a dining room floor.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind 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. The gangway sets the dimension, not the drawing.

An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. The lean-to roof drains into a valley gutter against the addition next door, and a long leak there shows at the head of the kitchen wall rather than on the ceiling. That measurement comes first: once the gangway is fixed the table dimension follows, and on most of these frontages that means a six hundred millimetre square for two and a seven hundred millimetre round where the room widens towards the back. Pavement covers take their own specification.