Restaurant and cafe table tops in Kenley

Yes. Kenley is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR8. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

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. Flats above set the hours the work can happen in. 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. 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. Radiators and rails cap the depth of a two-seat piece.

The lift is only part of the route, and the corridor from the lobby to the flat door often holds a tighter turn than the car does. 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 stacked flat on a dining room floor. 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. One stop, and the count is proved before we leave.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. 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. 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. One set of decisions, repeated across the whole room. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. 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 seating plan is priced as a list of pieces. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

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. 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. 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. An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. 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. Ten years of service is a different specification entirely.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. 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. Sizes settle the yield before the shape does.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. A serving hatch through to the dining room is common, and closing one up leaves a panel of newer wall exactly where the run passes. 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. Every face polished, because a table is looked down on.

Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. 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. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. Feet are wound out where the floor falls away.

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. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. A rated load sounds ample until three lengths of granite and two fitters are standing on it, so the stone goes up one piece at a time. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. The turn is measured for the frame, not for a person.