Restaurant and cafe table tops in North Ealing

Yes. North Ealing is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W5. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Ealing. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Deliveries land before the doors open wherever possible. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Handmade brick and lime plaster move visibly along a run, and a straight-cut back edge shows it immediately. Hospitality in an area like this is often a converted house, so the dining space is several small rooms rather than one and the sizes vary room by room. What the unit was before decides what it needs now. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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. A shallow room decides the diameter early.

The van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. 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. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. 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. The plan on the van matches the plan on the floor.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. A second kitchen or a kitchenette in an annexe is a small job with the same fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines as a large one. 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. Spares are cheap while the run is still on the ground. Where an annexe has been built or converted, its floor and its walls are newer than the main house and behave differently under the same run. 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 batch reference goes on file with the drawing.

A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. 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. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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. Sharp corners are eased wherever people pass. 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. Nothing is ordered against a verbal instruction.

What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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. Weight low, spread wide, and it stays put.

Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. These houses usually sit in their own grounds with a long approach, so the carry from van to door is longer than anything inside the building. A garden or a terrace comes with most of these, and the outdoor covers are a different specification from the ones standing indoors. Frontage, gangway and covers, in that order.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Sliding or folding doors take the whole garden wall, so a long stretch of the room has glass where a wall would otherwise carry the units. Table tops sit outside all of that, because a top touches no wall at all and every one of its edges is profiled, polished and on show. Base spread against top size is checked before a size is agreed.

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. Extended households run kitchens hard, and that pushes the specification towards granite or sintered stone rather than a light quartz. A fit-out programme runs to an opening date that does not move, so the sizes are frozen and the slab committed earlier than most jobs need. Repeat work is quoted against the original, not from scratch.