Restaurant and cafe table tops in Selhurst

Yes. Selhurst is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE25. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. Streets near a ground or a venue have restrictions that come and go with the fixture list rather than with the time of day. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. An unload that overruns costs a service, so it does not. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

The communal stair is wide and handsome and the flat door at the top of it is a standard leaf, which is where a long piece stops. The trade on streets like these sits in a parade of narrow shopfronts, so the dining room is long and thin and the covers are won by the width of the gangway rather than by the size of the room. Frontage, gangway and covers, in that order. 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. Radiators and rails cap the depth of a two-seat piece.

Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. 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. Packaging goes back on the van rather than into the yard. On an event day the controls are wider, tighter and enforced harder than the signage suggests on any other morning of the week. 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 bay is booked against the fitting date, not the week.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop templating. 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. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. 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. Buying twice costs more than buying deep once. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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 phased opening is planned as a single order.

Older houses put the boiler or the meter on one of the two walls, and whatever is boxed in around it sets the point where that run has to stop. 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. A spare comes off the same run or it is not a spare. 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. An awkward corner takes a made shape. Send the seating plan with the gangway widths marked, and bring in one of the bases or the maker’s drawing so the bolt centres can be measured properly. 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. 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. Decisions made remotely still need a physical sample.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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. Feet are wound out where the floor falls away.

Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. 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. Pieces are numbered so none of them is carried twice.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. 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. What gets damaged on a route like that is a corner, and a table corner is polished, exposed and at precisely the height of a door frame. The last thing carried in is the first one set out.

A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. 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. The blank decides the diameter, not the other way round.