Restaurant and cafe table tops in Eastcote

Yes. Eastcote is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA5, HA4. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hillingdon. Where the drive is shared, the half-hour the van spends in the way is agreed with the neighbour in advance rather than apologised for at the time. 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 van stays until the last piece is on its base. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The floor is a solid slab with a screed over it, which is stable underfoot and rarely flat across a long run. Parades of this period usually keep a service road or a yard behind them, so a full order can arrive at the back and the dining room stays laid up while it does. What the unit was before decides what it needs now. Where the structure cannot be cut into, the stone is relieved instead, and a relief that deep changes both the yield off the slab and how the piece is handled. 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. Radiators and rails cap the depth of a two-seat piece.

A loading bay or a red route puts a clock on the unload, so the pieces come off in the order they will be fitted rather than the order they were loaded. 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. A step up from the drive to the threshold turns the last two metres into a lift, and a lift is where two pairs of hands become the minimum. 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 quiet hour is worth more to us than a close bay.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. 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. 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. Orders are counted in pieces and never in metres. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Ordered as a set, so the set matches.

Waterfall ends are cut in sequence off the length either side of the top so the vein carries down the leg, and that sequence is gone the moment a piece has to be recut. 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. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

An intruding steel column, a brick pier or a downstand breaks a run that would otherwise have been one clean piece. 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. An awkward corner takes a made shape. Confirm how many covers go outside, and tell us whether the outdoor bases share the pattern of the indoor ones, since they often do not. An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. 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.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Ceilings are lath and plaster at the front and plasterboard in the extension, and the join between the two marks where the original back wall stood. 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. One piece per table, with no join in it anywhere.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. 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.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The consumer unit and the meter often sit high on the wall at one end of the kitchen, and neither of them is going to move to suit a run of stone. 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. Outdoor covers take a different stone from indoor ones.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Everything on an island is fed from underneath, extraction, a socket run, a hob and sometimes a waste, and each of them wants its hole before the top is bonded down. 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. Cut from the same run as the counter, so the room agrees.