Restaurant and cafe table tops in Wealdstone

Yes. Wealdstone is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA3. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Harrow. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. 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. Empty frames go back on the van the same trip. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The staircase rises over the back room in a good number of these, so a sloping bulkhead sits over one end of the run and a piece cannot be stood on edge beneath it. 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 narrow frontage is a small diameter, honestly stated. 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. 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. Weight low, spread wide, and it stays put.

A goods lift booked by the hour puts a clock on the whole delivery, so pieces go up in a planned order and nothing is handled twice. 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. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. A suspension costs less than a lost fit-out morning.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. 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. 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. Spares are cheap while the run is still on the ground. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. The batch reference goes on file with the drawing.

Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. 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 poseur height changes the base and not the blank. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. 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 step in the floor is a base decision. 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. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. 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. Sign-off covers shape, edge, drilling and count.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The back addition is frequently a single skin of brick rendered on both faces, which takes a fixing badly and moves with the weather. 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. The base plate settles the drilling before the stone is cut.

The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. 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. Squares off one slab and rounds off another, where that is cheaper.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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. Pieces are staged inside before the van is moved off.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. A two-up two-down has a kitchen that was never designed to be one, so the run is short, the ceiling is low and every millimetre of depth gets argued over. 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. What the parade allows is what the room can seat.