Restaurant and cafe table tops in Merton Park

Yes. Merton Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW19. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Floors are boards over joists with a solid floor only in the service rooms, and the two meet somewhere in the middle of the kitchen. Hospitality in an area like this is usually a converted house or an old inn, so the dining space is several small rooms rather than one, and each room takes a different table size. Chair backs do more damage than plates ever do. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. A rocking table is a floor problem and not a stone one.

Sign-in at the gate, a permit on the dash and a named contact are usually wanted before anything comes off the van. 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 carried past a chair still in the gangway. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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. Loading rules are confirmed with the operator beforehand.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop templating and worktop installation. 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 new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Lead time is the reason the date is set early. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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 breakage next winter is a phone call, not a problem.

Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. 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. Shapes are drawn rather than described. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. The gangway is a measurement rather than an impression. Send a plan of each room with its table sizes against it, and say which covers are outdoors so the material can be split before anything is priced. Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. 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. Consistency across sites is a decision, not an accident.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. 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.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Fixed seating fixes the dimension it faces.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. An unload that overruns costs a service, so it does not.

How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. Volume moves the price per piece, and it should.