Restaurant and cafe table tops in Green Street Green

Yes. Green Street Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR6. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Delivery is booked to the room, not to a half day. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A boiler in a cupboard on the kitchen wall is normal in this stock, and its position is fixed by its flue. Trade in this stock is a single shopfront with a small room behind it, so an order is a dozen pieces rather than fifty, and that changes what is worth doing rather than how it is done. What the parade allows is what the room can seat. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. 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 rocking table is a floor problem and not a stone one.

Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. 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. Two hands to a piece, however light it looks. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. 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. Empty frames go back on the van the same trip.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop design & quotation. 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. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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 trial piece before a large order is money well spent. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. Orders are counted in pieces and never in metres.

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. 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 poseur height changes the base and not the blank. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. 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. The gangway is a measurement rather than an impression. 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. 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. The length of the lease is a legitimate reason to specify differently, and nobody should be talked into a decade of surface for five years of trading. A managed building wants notice and it gets notice.

Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. A suspension costs less than a lost fit-out morning.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. 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. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. Corners take the knocks, so corners get the padding.

Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. 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. Fixed seating fixes the dimension it faces.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. 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. 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.