Restaurant and cafe table tops in Squirrels Heath

Yes. Squirrels Heath is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM2, RM11. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. Where the van cannot turn on the plot it has to arrive already facing the right way, so the approach along the street is part of the plan. 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. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

There is a chimney breast on each flank wall, and the one in the kitchen carried a boiler flue rather than a fireplace, so the recess beside it is shallow. 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. Long hours push the choice towards a harder face. 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. 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. A thin top over a wide plate wants a pad underneath.

Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. 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. Pieces are numbered so none of them is carried twice. 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. 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 particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop replacement. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. 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. A trial piece before a large order is money well spent. 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. 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. Orders are counted in pieces and never in metres.

A U shape uses more linear metres than people expect, and the two returns rarely nest together, so a second slab is a genuine possibility. 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. Offcuts from a counter become the smaller pieces. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. Uneven flags outside are why outdoor feet adjust. 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. 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. Loose furniture rather than a landlord fixture.

The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. 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. 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. The last thing carried in is the first one set out.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. The original floor is timber over a deep ventilated void with air bricks right round the perimeter, and the extension slab butts straight up against it. Parades of this period usually keep a service yard behind them, so tops and bases arrive at the back and the dining room stays laid up while they do. A shopfront door is the only way in on most parades.

The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Solid brick with a sand and cement render is firm to work against and reliably out of plumb across the length of a run. 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. Twenty tops that match, not twenty that nearly do.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. With three walls in play the chance of one of them being out of square is high, and the template has to carry all three angles. 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. A set is laid out together before anything is wrapped.