Restaurant and cafe table tops in Hook

Yes. Hook is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are KT9. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Kingston upon Thames. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Pieces are staged inside before the van is moved off. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen has a door to the hall, a door to the garden and a window over the sink, so the continuous run is short in every direction. The trade in this stock is a row of units under a block: a roller shutter, a shallow room behind it and a paved forecourt in front with bollards across the approach. Flats above set the hours the work can happen in. 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. 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 side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. 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. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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. The pavement stays walkable while the frames come off.

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. 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. A refit is a resurface where the pedestals are sound. 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. One set of decisions, repeated across the whole room.

A peninsula is an island with one end tied to a run, which means the join between them has to be planned rather than allowed to happen. 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. A spare comes off the same run or it is not a spare. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

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. 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. Residents are given written notice before anyone attends, and that notice period rather than the workshop is what governs the earliest sensible start. 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.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. 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. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Radiators and rails cap the depth of a two-seat piece.

Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. The measurement that governs everything here is the gangway, because it caps the diameter before anybody has chosen a colour. An awkward corner takes a made shape.

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. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Built-in stores and a fuel place beside the back door were standard, and one of them is usually still sitting in the corner of the kitchen. That forecourt is the carry, and it is longer than it looks, so the pieces travel the last stretch on a trolley in a frame rather than being walked in by hand. A rear yard is worth an hour of the day.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. The ceiling is a concrete soffit with a skim on it, so there is nothing to fix into overhead and no void to hide anything in. 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. The underside matters, because a hand goes under every edge.