Restaurant and cafe table tops in North Cray

Yes. North Cray is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA14. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. 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. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Doorways are low and narrow, which is a genuine constraint on piece length before anything else is considered. 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. Terraces and gardens live outdoors all year. An intruding steel column, a brick pier or a downstand breaks a run that would otherwise have been one clean piece. 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. Every piece is offered up to its own pedestal.

A height barrier on the car park entrance rules out a tail-lift van outright, and the stone then transfers to a trolley at the barrier 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. Polished faces never travel touching each other. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. 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.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. 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. 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. Volume moves the price per piece, and it should. 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. The programme decides the delivery, not the workshop.

A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. 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.

Where a column lands in the run the template plots its actual outline so the stone is cut to fit around it rather than stopped short and filled. 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. Nothing is trimmed on site to make it fit. 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. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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. Nothing is ordered against a verbal instruction.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. 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.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Lime plaster over rubble moves in and out enough that a single long panel will show a gap somewhere along its length. That is fine, but it has to be drawn: a room of one-offs prices differently from a room of repeats, and the difference is real rather than a markup. Converted houses mean several sizes, not one.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Exposed structure means the back edge is not a straight line at all, and a scribe of fifteen or twenty millimetres across a run is normal. 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. What the room does to the base matters more than the wall.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. 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. Veining is laid out so no two pieces read as a pair.