Restaurant and cafe table tops in Sydenham

Yes. Sydenham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE26. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. Building management is often the real gate rather than the bay itself, since the barrier, the shutter and the lift each need someone with a fob. 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. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Electrics went in at conversion, some in surface trunking and some chased into lath and plaster, so no cable route in these rooms is safe to assume. 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. A narrow frontage is a small diameter, honestly stated. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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.

Pendant fittings over the stairwell and anything hung on the half-landing come down first, because a piece on edge sweeps a wider arc than the people carrying it. 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. Battens under anything that has to wait. Time-limited bays are camera-enforced across a lot of managed estates, so the unload runs to the clock and the van moves off afterwards. 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 particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. 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. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. Volume moves the price per piece, and it should.

The free end is what needs deciding early: square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall to the floor, and a waterfall is cut in sequence off the same part of the slab. 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. Sizes settle the yield before the shape does. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. 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 owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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. Consistency across sites is a decision, not an accident.

Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Peninsulas frequently land on a lightweight partition or on units that were never fixed down, and stone needs proper support under it before it goes on. Rounds waste the corners of their blank where squares do not, so the mix of shapes moves the slab count more than the number of covers does. One repeated size cuts better than six one-offs.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. A fit-out programme runs to an opening date that does not move, so the sizes are frozen and the slab committed earlier than most jobs need. The programme decides the delivery, not the workshop.

Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. The combination boiler hangs on whichever wall happened to be external, and that decision has already used up a stretch of the only wall the run wanted. 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. Pavement covers take their own specification.