Restaurant and cafe table tops in West Norwood

Yes. West Norwood is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE27. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. 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. A suspension costs less than a lost fit-out morning. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

A conversion takes kitchen waste to a stack added to the outside of the building, which fixes the sink position long before anyone draws a layout. 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 shell unit is drawn before it is measured. A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. 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 clearance under a fixed shelf is measured, not assumed.

Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. 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. Nothing is stacked flat on a dining room floor. 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. 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.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. 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. 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 second site is quoted from the same specification. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. 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. Held stock is worth more than a discount.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. 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. Squares off one slab and rounds off another, where that is cheaper. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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. Room by room, since no two of them are the same. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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. The specification is written so it can be repeated.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. 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. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. The pavement stays walkable while the frames come off.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. There is usually a step down into the back addition, so the kitchen floor and the hall floor are not the same level and neither of them is flat. 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.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Sash windows sit low in the rear wall, and the sill often lands below the height a worktop wants to run past. 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. Chosen for service, not for the photographs on opening night.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. A hall radiator or a coat hook at shoulder height takes a hundred millimetres off the usable width, and a hundred millimetres is often the entire margin. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. The turn is measured for the frame, not for a person.