Restaurant and cafe table tops in St Quintin Park

Yes. St Quintin Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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 quiet hour is worth more to us than a close bay. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The original range recess often survives as a shallow alcove with an iron lintel over it, a hundred millimetres deeper than the wall either side of it. 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. Converted houses mean several sizes, not one. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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.

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. 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. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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. Nothing is left on a pavement while a space is found.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. 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. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Orders are counted in pieces and never in metres. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Ordered as a set, so the set matches.

The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. 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 set is laid out together before anything is wrapped. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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. What the room does to the base matters more than the wall. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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. A short term does not justify a surface that fails early.

The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. The carcasses stay put. Only the surface changes. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. Delivery is booked to the room, not to a half day.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Ceilings in the addition are lower than in the front rooms, so the band of wall between the worktop and the wall units is shorter than the rest of the house suggests. That measurement comes first: once the gangway is fixed the table dimension follows, and on most of these frontages that means a six hundred millimetre square for two and a seven hundred millimetre round where the room widens towards the back. A loading bay is the easiest delivery there is.

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. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. A thin top over a wide plate wants a pad underneath.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The back addition is frequently a single skin of brick rendered on both faces, which takes a fixing badly and moves with the weather. 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. Cut to your bases rather than to a size off a list.