Restaurant and cafe table tops in Joydens Wood

Yes. Joydens Wood is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA5. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. 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. 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 pavement stays walkable while the frames come off. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

These were built with generous circulation, so an island or a peninsula fits in a room that would be too tight in a house of the same floor area. 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. Deliveries follow the premises rather than the postcode. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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. Radiators and rails cap the depth of a two-seat piece.

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. 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. Each piece is checked off against the plan as it lands. 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. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. One stop, and the count is proved before we leave.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop design & quotation and worktop templating. 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. 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. 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. One set of decisions, repeated across the whole room. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. Buying twice costs more than buying deep once.

It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. 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. The gangway sets the dimension, not the drawing. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear 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. An awkward corner takes a made shape. 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. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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. Ten years of service is a different specification entirely.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. 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. 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. Every face polished, because a table is looked down on.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. The scullery and the kitchen were knocked into one at some point, and the stub of the old dividing wall is still there under the plaster. A dining room orders tops in sets, so the question is never one piece but twenty that have to read as one colour. The stone is straightforward and the base fixing is the job.

Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Feet are wound out where the floor falls away.

Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. 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. Offcuts from a counter become the smaller pieces.