Restaurant and cafe table tops in Shacklewell

Yes. Shacklewell is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E8. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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. The unload is timed between service, never through it. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Many of these had a bathroom or a WC built onto the far end of the addition, so the room now ends at a stud wall rather than at the original brickwork. 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. Roller shutters and bollards lengthen the carry. 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. 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.

The top step is rarely the end of it, because a door swinging out onto the landing has to be held back before a piece can come off the flight. 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. The frame needs the clearance the piece does. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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 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. 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. 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. Match it now or hunt for it later.

Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. 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. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through 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. Consent for the work sits with the freeholder or the managing body, and getting it in writing first avoids a crew arriving to a locked door. 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. Written approval before cutting, every time.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. 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. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. 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. The blank decides the diameter, not the other way round.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. 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. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. The base carries the weight and the floor carries the base.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. 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. Mixed sizes are fine; unplanned mixed sizes are not.