Restaurant and cafe table tops in Parsloes

Yes. Parsloes is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM9. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Some of these plans put a bathroom on the ground floor off the kitchen, so a third door opens into a room that already has more doors than wall. The trade in this stock is a row of units under a block: a roller shutter, a shallow room behind it and a paved forecourt in front with bollards across the approach. A shopfront door is the only way in on most parades. Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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.

Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. 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 lift takes a loaded frame or it takes nothing. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. 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 bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops.

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. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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. What one room learns, the next room uses. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. 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. Turnover between operators rarely changes the pedestals.

The joint where a peninsula meets the main run wants a gable directly under it, and where the units do not offer one, steel goes in to carry that joint instead. 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 largest blank is nested first and the rest around it. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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. Tell us how close a van can get to the door, and whether the tables have to be moved regularly, since that decides the thickness before anything else does. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. 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. Written approval before cutting, every time.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Garden routes carry their own hazards: a drain cover, a step up to a patio, wet decking, or a lawn that will not take a loaded trolley. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. Handling is where a polished edge gets damaged.

Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. The rear door has a concrete step and a small canopy over it, and that step is the whole of the difference between the kitchen floor and the garden path. That forecourt is the carry, and it is longer than it looks, so the pieces travel the last stretch on a trolley in a frame rather than being walked in by hand. Small rooms want small pieces and steady bases.

Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. A breakfast bar on the outer side is an overhang like any other, and the support under it is sized for people leaning on the end rather than for the weight of the stone alone. 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. A poseur height changes the base and not the blank.