Restaurant and cafe table tops in Fulham Broadway

Yes. Fulham Broadway is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW6. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. On an event day the controls are wider, tighter and enforced harder than the signage suggests on any other morning of the week. 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 pavement stays walkable while the frames come off. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These flats have been reconfigured more than once, so the kitchen often sits in what was a bedroom with services run a long way to reach it. A whole slab still gets reserved, because a dozen matching tops is the entire point of ordering them together. A high ceiling wants a thicker edge under it. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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 thin top over a wide plate wants a pad underneath.

A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. 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. The practical answer is to check the fixture list before the date is offered, because a template slot lost to a road closure cannot be recovered that week. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. 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 installation and worktop templating. 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. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. 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. The count is agreed before the slab is committed. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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. Lead time is the reason the date is set early.

The free end is what needs deciding early: square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall to the floor, and a waterfall is cut in sequence off the same part of the slab. 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. Colour is matched across the room, not table by table. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. 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. Uneven flags outside are why outdoor feet adjust. Bring in one base, or send the maker’s plate drawing, and tell us the table count including any spares you want to hold back. Quartz is the sensible default in a rental: nothing to seal, nothing to maintain, and nothing an incoming tenant needs briefing on. 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. A managed building wants notice and it gets notice.

Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. The carcasses stay put. Only the surface changes. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Where an event closes the road entirely, the van cannot be moved once it is in, which is a different problem from not being able to park at all. 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. A shared forecourt is booked rather than chanced.

Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. 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. 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. The clearance under a fixed shelf is measured, not assumed.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Room by room, since no two of them are the same.

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. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. A stub wall divides the kitchen from the back lobby, and it rarely stayed where the original drawing put it. 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. The seating plan sets the sizes before the slab does.