Restaurant and cafe table tops in King's Cross

Yes. King's Cross is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N1C, N1, NW1. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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. A long push from the kerb is planned, not discovered. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Services were designed in rather than added later, so waste and feeds come up where the drawing put them and the sink is not moving. The complication is the programme rather than the building. A rear yard is worth an hour of the day. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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. Banquette seating wants a cantilever foot under it.

Car depth is the number that settles it wherever a piece cannot be stood upright, and most residential cars are shallower than the run they are serving. 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. The turn is measured for the frame, not for a person. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Frames come off before pallets so the floor stays clear.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop fabrication and worktop design & quotation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Handover-spec kitchens are square, plumb and predictable, which means the join count is honest and driven by run length rather than by the building. 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. A specification repeated across several plots has to be repeatable, which quietly rules out the natural stones where no two slabs match. 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.

Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. 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 count per slab is worked before a figure is given. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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. A rocking table is a floor problem and not a stone one. Send the fit-out drawing with final table positions and sizes, the base specification, and the delivery window the managing agent is prepared to accept. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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. A licence to alter is not needed for something unfixed.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. 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 long communal piece is a slab-length question.

Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A car ceiling at 2.2m sets the tallest thing that will stand in it, and the trap panel and light fitting take a slice off even that. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. Wrapping stays on until the pedestal is standing.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. An infill house is built to modern standards on an old plot, so the room is square even though the site around it is not. The commercial space in a block like this is a ground-floor unit with a service bay behind it, which is the easiest delivery a table order ever gets. A high ceiling wants a thicker edge under it.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. 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. Where a run finishes hard against a wall the last few millimetres are scribed, and where it finishes in open floor it is cut square and polished, which is two different jobs on one length. 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. Shapes are drawn rather than described.