Restaurant and cafe table tops in Roxbourne

Yes. Roxbourne is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA2. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Harrow. On a drive that only takes one vehicle nose-in, the van has to reverse the whole length of it to get back out, which decides which way it goes in. 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. Frames come off before pallets so the floor stays clear. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

The floor is a concrete slab screeded before the units existed, so it falls slightly and consistently towards the back door. 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 basement is for prep and not for storing stone. 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. Overhang past the plate is where a table tips.

A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. 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. 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. 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. Loading rules are confirmed with the operator beforehand.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. 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. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. Held stock is worth more than a discount. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. What one room learns, the next room uses.

Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. 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. Rectangles nest and rounds do not. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

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. Radiators and rails cap the depth of a two-seat piece. 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. A leaseholder paying for their own kitchen inside managed stock still needs the freeholder to consent, and that consent is about the building and the common parts rather than about the worktop. 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. The drawing goes to whoever has to approve it.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The units stay where they are and only the surface changes. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. An unload that overruns costs a service, so it does not.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. A passive vent or a ducted extract shaft takes a corner of the kitchen from floor to ceiling and cannot be reduced. 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 spare top is the cheapest insurance in the room.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. No money changes hands before the template. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. Windows sit in deep concrete reveals with a cast sill, and that reveal is usually the least square thing in the room. 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. Made to the plate you own, so nothing else has to be replaced.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. 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. 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.