Restaurant and cafe table tops in Purley

Yes. Purley is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR8. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. The distance from the standing to the actual kitchen door is the number that counts, since plenty of drives finish at a side gate and a garden path. 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 long push from the kerb is planned, not discovered. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Houses at the later end of this period went up in cavity rather than solid brick, so two that look identical from the road behave differently when a fixing goes in. 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. A rear yard is worth an hour of the day. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. Weight low, spread wide, and it stays put.

A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. 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. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Frames come off before pallets so the floor stays clear.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication 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. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. A second site is quoted from the same specification. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. Held stock is worth more than a discount.

It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. 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 supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

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. 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. A step in the floor is a base decision. 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. A quartz sample left on the counter for a week under the actual kitchen lights settles more arguments than any showroom, and an owner is the only person in a position to do that. 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. The specification is written so it can be repeated.

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. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. 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. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Every piece is offered up to its own pedestal.

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. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. There is a chimney breast on each flank wall, and the one in the kitchen carried a boiler flue rather than a fireplace, so the recess beside it is shallow. Parades of this period usually keep a service yard behind them, so tops and bases arrive at the back and the dining room stays laid up while they do. Long hours push the choice towards a harder face.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. A shallow bay or a squared-off rear window means the run beneath it is rarely the same depth at both ends. 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. A dining room is a batch, and a batch is one slab run.

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. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. 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. Nothing is cut until the seating plan stops moving.