Restaurant and cafe table tops in Telegraph Hill

Yes. Telegraph Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE14. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. 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 unload is timed between service, never through it. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A large villa has wide doors, a generous hall and somewhere to park, so the joins that go in are chosen for layout rather than forced by the route. Hospitality in an area like this is usually a converted house or an old inn, so the dining space is several small rooms rather than one, and each room takes a different table size. A narrow frontage is a small diameter, honestly stated. 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. 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. What the room does to the base matters more than the wall.

A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. 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 way in is walked before the van doors open. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. 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. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop replacement. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. A breakage next winter is a phone call, not a problem. 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 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. Volume moves the price per piece, and it should.

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. What a counter leaves behind is worth designing for. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. 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 thin top over a wide plate wants a pad underneath. Send a plan of each room with its table sizes against it, and say which covers are outdoors so the material can be split before anything is priced. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. 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. Whoever signs off is agreed before machining starts.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. A curved bay or a canted corner turns up more often here than people expect, and a curve is templated and cut, never bent. 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. The bases stay yours and only the surface changes.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. 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. Only the surface changes. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. The bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops.

Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. These kitchens are big rooms with long perimeter runs and an island, so level has to hold across the whole floor rather than along one wall. That is fine, but it has to be drawn: a room of one-offs prices differently from a room of repeats, and the difference is real rather than a markup. Pavement covers take their own specification.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. 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. Larger diameters go in early, while the floor is still clear.