Restaurant and cafe table tops in Hayes

Yes. Hayes is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR2. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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 suspension costs less than a lost fit-out morning. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Post-war terraces have a short straight hall to the kitchen, which is a good deal kinder than the houses they replaced. 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. A shell unit is drawn before it is measured. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. 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. Nothing is scribed, because nothing meets a wall.

Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. 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. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. 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. Pieces are staged inside before the van is moved off.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop replacement. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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 bases usually stay and only the pieces change. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. A refit is a resurface where the pedestals are sound.

With three walls in play the chance of one of them being out of square is high, and the template has to carry all three angles. 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. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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. Levelled at the feet, never packed under the stone. 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. Owner-occupied kitchens are usually being done once, which is why the edge profile, the vein direction and where a join falls are worth the conversation. 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 invoice and the approval carry the same name.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. No money is taken before the template happens. Blockwork with a hard render that has been patched over decades looks modern and behaves nothing like 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 stone is straightforward and the base fixing is the job.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. 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. Polished faces never travel touching each other.

Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Walls look modern and are not: block or breeze with a skim that has been patched over decades, so dry-laying and scribing still apply. A whole slab still gets reserved, because a dozen matching tops is the entire point of ordering them together. Flats above set the hours the work can happen in.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Floors have usually settled towards the rear, so levelling means packing the units before the stone beds down. A dining room orders tops in sets, so the question is never one piece but twenty that have to read as one colour. Sizes agreed on paper before any slab is committed.