Restaurant and cafe table tops in Munster Village

Yes. Munster Village is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW6. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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. An unload that overruns costs a service, so it does not. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

A small room puts the sink, hob and tap cut-outs close together on one short length, and the bridge of stone left between them decides whether it can be cut in one piece. The trade on streets like these sits in a parade of narrow shopfronts, so the dining room is long and thin and the covers are won by the width of the gangway rather than by the size of the room. Roller shutters and bollards lengthen the carry. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. The gangway is a measurement rather than an impression.

A fitted stair carpet is either lifted or covered, because grit trodden into it under work boots does more harm than the carry itself. 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. A trolley run across a forecourt gets boarded like any other. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. The bay is booked against the fitting date, not the week.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. 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. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. Fit-out dates are worked backwards from the opening. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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. The bases usually stay and only the pieces change.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. 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. Nothing is cut until the seating plan stops moving. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. Fixed seating fixes the dimension it faces. Send the seating plan with the gangway widths marked, and bring in one of the bases or the maker’s drawing so the bolt centres can be measured properly. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. 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. Ownership of the pedestals is worth establishing early.

Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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. Overhang past the plate is where a table tips.

Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. 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. Colour is matched across the room, not table by table.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. Where a servery run forces a join, the tables never carry one, because a table top is a single piece of stone or it is not a table top. Veining is laid out so no two pieces read as a pair.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Stone goes up on edge, and it is the half-landing turn rather than the flight itself that sets the maximum piece. 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.