Restaurant and cafe table tops in Ealing Common

Yes. Ealing Common is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W5. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Ealing. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. 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. The unload is timed between service, never through it. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Internal walls are lath and plaster on studs with heavy framing behind, so a fixing finds either nothing at all or something very solid. That is fine, but it has to be drawn: a room of one-offs prices differently from a room of repeats, and the difference is real rather than a markup. Small rooms want small pieces and steady bases. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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.

A Victorian hall arch sits lower than the ceiling either side of it, and it is the point a piece carried on edge meets first. 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. Each piece is checked off against the plan as it lands. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. 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 whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop templating. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. 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. 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. Turnover between operators rarely changes the pedestals. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. 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. Match it now or hunt for it later.

A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. 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. Sizes settle the yield before the shape does. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. 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 a plan of each room with its table sizes against it, and say which covers are outdoors so the material can be split before anything is priced. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. 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. The drawing goes to whoever has to approve it.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. A meter cupboard set into the hall wall narrows the run at exactly the height a carried piece travels. 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 carried past a chair still in the gangway.

Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Whether the kitchen sits straight ahead or off a turn at the end of the hall changes the maximum piece far more than the hall width does. What gets damaged on a route like that is a corner, and a table corner is polished, exposed and at precisely the height of a door frame. Polished faces never travel touching each other.

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. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. 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. One repeated size cuts better than six one-offs.

Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. A fit-out programme runs to an opening date that does not move, so the sizes are frozen and the slab committed earlier than most jobs need. A trial piece before a large order is money well spent.