Restaurant and cafe table tops in Fortis Green

Yes. Fortis Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N10, N2. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Haringey. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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 pavement stays walkable while the frames come off. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

These were built late enough to have a damp course and proper footings, so the front of the house is close to true and the rear addition holding the kitchen is the part that has dropped. 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 rear yard is worth an hour of the day. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. The clearance under a fixed shelf is measured, not assumed.

A front path with a gate and a turn or two adds handling before the door is even reached, and every handling movement is another chance to catch a corner. 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. Nothing is carried past a chair still in the gangway. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. Where the standing is short the pieces are counted off at the tail lift against the plan rather than checked once they are already inside. One stop, and the count is proved before we leave.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. 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 second room is easier to match if it is mentioned now. 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. Spares are cheap while the run is still on the ground.

Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. 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. What a counter leaves behind is worth designing for. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. Room by room, since no two of them are the same. 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. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. 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. Sign-off covers shape, edge, drilling and count.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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. Nothing is scribed, because nothing meets a wall.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. 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. The largest blank is nested first and the rest around it.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. The kitchen occupies the ground floor of the addition with a garden door at the far end, so there is a second way in that is narrower than the front door and a great deal shorter. 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. A high ceiling wants a thicker edge under it.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. The batch reference goes on file with the drawing.