Restaurant and cafe table tops in Selsdon

Yes. Selsdon is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR2. 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. Loading rules are confirmed with the operator beforehand. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A side alley and a back door mean most pieces go in whole, and it is the alley width rather than the front door that decides it. Parades of this period usually keep a service road or a yard behind them, so a full order can arrive at the back and the dining room stays laid up while it does. Converted houses mean several sizes, not one. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. 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. Nothing is trimmed on site to make it fit.

A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. 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. A lift takes a loaded frame or it takes nothing. 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. An unload that overruns costs a service, so it does not.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop templating. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Turnover between operators rarely changes the pedestals. 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. 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. Match it now or hunt for it later.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. 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. Colour is matched across the room, not table by table. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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. What the room does to the base matters more than the wall. 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. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. 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. Who pays and who approves are worth naming early.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Ceilings are lath and plaster at the front and plasterboard in the extension, and the join between the two marks where the original back wall stood. 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. No wall behind it, so nothing about it is hidden.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. The carcasses stay. Only the surface changes. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. 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.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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. A thin top over a wide plate wants a pad underneath.

A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. An island carries its own edge detail all the way round, so a mitred 100mm apron on four sides is four mitres cut, bonded and polished before the piece ever leaves the bench. 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. Veining is laid out so no two pieces read as a pair.