Restaurant and cafe table tops in South Beddington

Yes. South Beddington is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SM6. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Sutton. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. 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. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The kitchen sits at the rear with a door to the garden and a window over the sink, so the useful run is broken into two short lengths. 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. Communal lengths belong in the larger units. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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. What the room does to the base matters more than the wall.

A loading bay or a red route puts a clock on the unload, so the pieces come off in the order they will be fitted rather than the order they were loaded. 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. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. 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 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. 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. 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. Match it now or hunt for it later. 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. 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 trial piece before a large order is money well spent.

The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. 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. The blank decides the diameter, not the other way round. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

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. 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. A thin top over a wide plate wants a pad underneath. 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. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. 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. Bolted to your own bases, so they leave when you do.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind 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. Mixed sizes are fine; unplanned mixed sizes are not.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. The units stay where they are and only the surface changes. What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. The unload is timed between service, never through it.

Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. 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. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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. Uneven flags outside are why outdoor feet adjust.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. The van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. Handling is where a polished edge gets damaged.