Restaurant and cafe table tops in Osterley

Yes. Osterley is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW7. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hounslow. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. 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. The plan on the van matches the plan on the floor. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Infill blocks were built on gaps in older streets, so a modern block sits between period buildings with no service access of its own. Trade in this stock is a single shopfront with a small room behind it, so an order is a dozen pieces rather than fifty, and that changes what is worth doing rather than how it is done. Frontage, gangway and covers, in that order. 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. A shallow room decides the diameter early.

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. Battens under anything that has to wait. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. A long push from the kerb is planned, not discovered.

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 fabrication. 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. 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. Sizes are frozen before machining rather than during it. 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 second site is quoted from the same specification.

Rooflights along a side return mean the worktop is lit from directly above all day, which shows every ripple in a surface and every gap at a scribe. 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. Shapes are drawn rather than described. 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. 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. Sharp corners are eased wherever people pass. Bring in one base, or send the maker’s plate drawing, and tell us the table count including any spares you want to hold back. 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. 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. An incoming operator inherits the pedestals, not the choice.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. These are small blocks with a single stair, no lift, and a communal door that will not stay open on its own. A whole slab still gets reserved, because a dozen matching tops is the entire point of ordering them together. Covers decide the count, and the count decides the order.

The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Where the drive is shared, the half-hour the van spends in the way is agreed with the neighbour in advance rather than apologised for at the time. 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. Frames come off before pallets so the floor stays clear.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. The way in is walked before the van doors open.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Bi-fold or sliding doors at the end of the return mean the run finishes against a frame rather than a wall, and a frame gives nothing to scribe into and no movement to take up. 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. Nothing is cut until the seating plan stops moving.