Restaurant and cafe table tops in Honor Oak

Yes. Honor Oak is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE23. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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 plan on the van matches the plan on the floor. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Copper pipework is clipped along the top of the skirting rather than buried in many of these, and it holds the carcasses off the wall by a few millimetres. The trade in this stock is a row of units under a block, usually a roller shutter with a shallow room behind it. A shell unit is drawn before it is measured. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. 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. Fixed seating fixes the dimension it faces.

A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that 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. Two hands to a piece, however light it looks. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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 long push from the kerb is planned, not discovered.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop templating. 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 managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. 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 breakage next winter is a phone call, not a problem. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. 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. Volume moves the price per piece, and it should.

Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. 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. Two-seaters and four-seaters come off one slab run. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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. Overhang past the plate is where a table tips. Tell us how close a van can get to the door, and whether the tables have to be moved regularly, since that decides the thickness before anything else does. These kitchens tend to be compact and reasonably square, so the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines are a larger share of the total than the stone is. 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. Loose furniture rather than a landlord fixture.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. 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 count per slab is worked before a figure is given.

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 and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Some of these plans put a bathroom on the ground floor off the kitchen, so a third door opens into a room that already has more doors than wall. Bollards and a paved forecourt keep a van further from the door than a map suggests, so the pieces travel the last stretch on a trolley. Flats above set the hours the work can happen in.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. Carrying down a flight is not the easier direction, because the weight runs ahead of the crew and whoever is at the bottom has no way of stopping a slip. 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. Corners take the knocks, so corners get the padding.

If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. 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. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. The rear door has a concrete step and a small canopy over it, and that step is the whole of the difference between the kitchen floor and the garden path. A cafe in a parade like this opens long hours on a thin margin, and the surface is chosen for how it survives a sanitiser cloth rather than for how it looks new. A rear yard is worth an hour of the day.