Restaurant and cafe table tops in Stockwell

Yes. Stockwell is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW9, SW8. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. Nothing is left on a pavement while a space is found. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Georgian houses put the kitchen in a basement or a rear closet wing, and the stairs down to it are the tightest part of the whole route. 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 shopfront door is the only way in on most parades. 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. 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.

Once a long piece is in on the diagonal there is no room left for anyone else, so it travels up alone and is met on the landing above. 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. Polished faces never travel touching each other. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Delivery is booked to the room, not to a half day.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating 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. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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. Lead time is the reason the date is set early. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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 breakage next winter is a phone call, not a problem.

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. Mixed sizes are fine; unplanned mixed sizes are not. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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. The base carries the weight and the floor carries the base. 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. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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. A short term does not justify a surface that fails early.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Chimney breasts are often taken out at ground level and left standing above, so the middle of the run is newer wall than the two ends of it. 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. Cut to your bases rather than to a size off a list.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. 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. Empty frames go back on the van the same trip.

Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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 shallow room decides the diameter early.

Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. The commercial frontage on streets like these is a narrow shop with the dining room running back from the pavement, so the tops go in past furniture that is already down. Small rooms want small pieces and steady bases.