Restaurant and cafe table tops in Dormers Wells

Yes. Dormers Wells is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are UB1. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Ealing. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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. Counted off at the tail lift where the standing is short. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Meters were moved out to a box on the flank wall on a later programme, and the cupboard they came out of is usually still standing in the corner. 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. A narrow frontage is a small diameter, honestly stated. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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. Every piece is offered up to its own pedestal.

A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. 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 turn is measured for the frame, not for a person. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. The van stays until the last piece is on its base.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. 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. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. A trial piece before a large order is money well spent. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Orders are counted in pieces and never in metres.

The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. 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 gangway sets the dimension, not the drawing. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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. Nothing is trimmed on site to make it fit. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Internal partitions are dense block finished in a hard sand and cement plaster, which is unforgiving to drill and unforgiving to make good. 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. A true circle comes off a machine and never off a hand.

Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. Wrapping stays on until the pedestal is standing.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. These kitchens give three metres of usable wall and no more, so a dimension out by a few millimetres costs a whole run rather than a piece. A dining room orders tops in sets, so the question is never one piece but twenty that have to read as one colour. Base spread against top size is checked before a size is agreed.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. 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. Offcuts from a counter become the smaller pieces.