Restaurant and cafe table tops in Putney Heath

Yes. Putney Heath is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW15. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Base units from the seventies and eighties are often only 500mm deep, so a 600mm stone top overhangs at the front and the doors want checking against it. 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. Long hours push the choice towards a harder face. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. 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.

Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. 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. Pieces come off the van in the order the room fills. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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 bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as 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. 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. 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. Where an operator changes hands the bases usually stay, so a refit becomes a resurface and the saving comes from what is already bolted down. Held stock is worth more than a discount.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. 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. Nothing is cut until the seating plan stops moving. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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. 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. These kitchens tend to be compact and reasonably square, so the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines are a larger share of the total than the stone is. 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. A brand standard is followed to the letter or not at all.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. Somewhere to stand the frames matters more than the distance.

How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. What one room learns, the next room uses.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Doorways are 762mm at best, and the turn from the hall into the kitchen is the pinch point rather than the front door. What a table top needs from us is a size, a shape and the base plate it has to be drilled to, and very little else. Cut to your bases rather than to a size off a list.

An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. The kitchen is at the front or the back depending on the plan, and which it is decides whether there is a rear door on the route at all. Trade in this stock is a single shopfront with a small room behind, so an order is a dozen pieces rather than fifty. A shopfront door is the only way in on most parades.