Restaurant and cafe table tops in Motspur Park

Yes. Motspur Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are KT3, SW20. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. 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. Where the van cannot wait, the room has to be ready. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Downstairs the hall and dining room are boarded but the kitchen was laid solid from the start, so the room sits on a different construction from the one beside it. Parades of this period usually keep a service yard behind them, so tops and bases arrive at the back and the dining room stays laid up while they do. Pavement covers take their own specification. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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. An awkward corner takes a made shape.

A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. 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. The frame needs the clearance the piece does. 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. 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. Deliveries land before the doors open wherever possible.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop design & quotation and worktop templating. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. 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. Two-seaters and four-seaters come off one slab run. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. 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. Feet are wound out where the floor falls away. 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 living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. 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.

Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. 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. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. The plan on the van matches the plan on the floor.

Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Deep timber window boards were fitted throughout and they stand proud of the plaster, so a top reaching the window meets a stepped edge rather than a flat one. The units are wider than an older shopfront and take a proper run of two-seaters down one wall, which is where a repeated size earns its keep. What the parade allows is what the room can seat.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. 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. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. The base carries the weight and the floor carries the base.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. 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. The count per slab is worked before a figure is given.