Restaurant and cafe table tops in Shooters Hill

Yes. Shooters Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE18. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. 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. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The kitchen is a rear service room with a scullery and a larder off it, and both have usually survived as separate spaces. Hospitality in an area like this is usually a converted house or an old inn, so the dining space is several small rooms rather than one, and each room takes a different table size. A narrow frontage is a small diameter, honestly stated. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. An awkward corner takes a made shape.

Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop design & quotation and worktop fabrication. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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. 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. Turnover between operators rarely changes the pedestals. 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. 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. Match it now or hunt for it later.

A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. 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. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. Feet are wound out where the floor falls away. Send a plan of each room with its table sizes against it, and say which covers are outdoors so the material can be split before anything is priced. Owner-occupied kitchens are usually being done once, which is why the edge profile, the vein direction and where a join falls are worth the conversation. 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. Bolted to your own bases, so they leave when you do.

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. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Windows are low and wide with deep timber cills and leaded lights, so a run under one meets joinery rather than plaster. That is fine, but it has to be drawn: a room of one-offs prices differently from a room of repeats, and the difference is real rather than a markup. Pavement covers take their own specification.

The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. The measurement that governs everything here is the gangway, because it caps the diameter before anybody has chosen a colour. A shallow room decides the diameter early.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Old flues run inside the wall behind the run, so a deep fixing finds a void about as often as it finds brick. 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. Nothing is drilled in your dining room.