Restaurant and cafe table tops in Streatham Vale

Yes. Streatham Vale is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW16. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. 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. The bay is booked against the fitting date, not the week. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The hall is parquet or original boards in a good many of these, and it is the surface that takes the traffic for the whole of a fitting day. 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. A shopfront door is the only way in on most parades. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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. The base carries the weight and the floor carries the base.

A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. 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. The last thing carried in is the first one set out. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. The unload is timed between service, never through it.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. 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 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. 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. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. Ordered as a set, so the set matches.

Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. 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. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

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. A shallow room decides the diameter early. 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. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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 lease term is a fair reason to specify differently.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. 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. The units stay where they are and only the surface changes. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can.

A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. 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. 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. Two-seaters and four-seaters come off one slab run.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. No money changes hands before the template. The boiler has usually been moved into the kitchen at some point, with its flue through the outer leaf and its pipework surface run to the nearest corner. 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.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. 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. A cellar stair is not a route for stone.