Restaurant and cafe table tops in Petts Wood

Yes. Petts Wood is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR5. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Where the dividing wall has come out there is a steel over the opening and a nib of the old wall left at each end, and a run turning that corner has to clear both nibs. The units are wider than an older shopfront, which is what makes a long wall of two-seaters work, and a repeated size is the single cheapest decision on the order because it nests tightly and makes a spare piece worth holding. Roller shutters and bollards lengthen the carry. 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. 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. Fixed seating fixes the dimension it faces.

The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. 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. Handling is where a polished edge gets damaged. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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 really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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.

Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. 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. Cut from the same run as the counter, so the room agrees. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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. Overhang past the plate is where a table tips. Confirm how many covers go outside, and tell us whether the outdoor bases share the pattern of the indoor ones, since they often do not. 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. 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. Sign-off covers shape, edge, drilling and count.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Rear extensions on these sit on shallow foundations, and the crack at the junction with the original wall tells you which way it has moved. 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. Cut to your bases rather than to a size off a list.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. 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 alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. 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. Packaging goes back on the van rather than into the yard.

A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. 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. A circle wastes its corners, and the quote says so.