Restaurant and cafe table tops in Furzedown

Yes. Furzedown is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW17, SW16. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. 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 bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The chimney breast served a back boiler and is usually still standing, so there is a shallow recess on one side of the room. 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. Frontage, gangway and covers, in that order. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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 column in the room is designed around, not cut around.

A hall radiator or a coat hook at shoulder height takes a hundred millimetres off the usable width, and a hundred millimetres is often the entire margin. 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. Polished faces never travel touching each other. A bay suspension carries a fee and a notice period, and the notice period is the part that catches people out when a date moves. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Somewhere to stand the frames matters more than the distance.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop fabrication and worktop replacement. 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. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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.

The advantage of a U is that every join can be put over a gable in a corner, so nothing lands in the middle of a clear length. 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. A spare comes off the same run or it is not a spare. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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. Banquette seating wants a cantilever foot under it. 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. A quartz sample left on the counter for a week under the actual kitchen lights settles more arguments than any showroom, and an owner is the only person in a position to do that. 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. What moves out with you is worth choosing well.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. 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. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. The rear extension is usually the newest and truest part of the building, so it is the older half of the kitchen that gives the trouble. 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. Corners eased, since chair backs find them first.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. The short run at the head of a U usually sits under a window, so that piece is scribed on three sides at once and has nowhere left to be pushed back to. 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. The blank decides the diameter, not the other way round.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. 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. A rocking table is a floor problem and not a stone one.

The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. An inter-war terrace is wider than a Victorian one and shallower than a semi, so the kitchen is a compact square room rather than a galley. The units are wider than an older shopfront, which is what makes a long wall of two-seaters work, and a repeated size is the single cheapest decision on the order because it nests tightly and makes a spare piece worth holding. Covers decide the count, and the count decides the order.