Restaurant and cafe table tops in Swiss Cottage

Yes. Swiss Cottage is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW3, NW6. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. 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. A clock on the kerb changes the order of unloading. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Floors are concrete with a screed and a thin finish, so there is no give anywhere and packing the carcasses is the only way to get a plane. Loading is restricted, often to a short window in the morning, so the order arrives complete and gets counted inside rather than on the pavement. A shell unit is drawn before it is measured. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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.

Pieces get staged in the ground floor lobby and sent up singly, which needs somewhere to stand them where nobody will walk into 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 frame needs the clearance the piece does. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Counted off at the tail lift where the standing is short.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. 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. Ordered as a set, so the set matches. 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. 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 second room is easier to match if it is mentioned now.

The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. 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. What a counter leaves behind is worth designing for. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over 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. Sharp corners are eased wherever people pass. Confirm the permitted loading times and any residents’ hours with the managing agent, and settle the edge profile and the thickness before the slab is cut. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. 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. Consistency across sites is a decision, not an accident.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Weight low, spread wide, and it stays put.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Steel windows sit in narrow reveals with a slim cill, which leaves almost no depth for an upstand to return into. The trade on a street of this sort sits at ground floor with flats above it, so deliveries run to a window and the window is short. Flats above set the hours the work can happen 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 sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Where a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. The van stays until the last piece is on its base.

A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. The step and the gap at the car threshold catch a trolley wheel, so the piece comes off the trolley and goes in by hand. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. A stack of tops is a weight before it is a delivery.