Restaurant and cafe table tops in White Hart Lane

Yes. White Hart Lane is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N17. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Haringey. An event-day suspension can override a bay that is perfectly usable the rest of the week, so a booked space gets checked again nearer the time. 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 van stays until the last piece is on its base. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

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 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. Pavement covers take their own specification. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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. Nothing is scribed, because nothing meets a wall.

A Victorian hall arch sits lower than the ceiling either side of it, and it is the point a piece carried on edge meets first. 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. Nothing is stacked flat on a dining room floor. Where a road is shut for filming or for works the diversion adds distance to the carry even when parking itself was never the problem. 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 quiet hour is worth more to us than a close bay.

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 installation. 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. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. Repeat work is quoted against the original, not from scratch. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. Fit-out dates are worked backwards from the opening.

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. Squares off one slab and rounds off another, where that is cheaper. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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. Levelled at the feet, never packed under the stone. 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. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. 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. Who pays and who approves are worth naming early.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. The rear wall of the addition carries both the back door and the window, which leaves very little unbroken wall for a run to sit against. 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. Twenty tops that match, not twenty that nearly do.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. 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. 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. Every dimension quoted is a finished dimension.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Lower ground floor kitchens are reached by a stair with a winder in it, and the head height over that winder is lower than the room at either end. A dining room orders tops in sets, so the question is never one piece but twenty that have to read as one colour. Chosen for service, not for the photographs on opening night.

What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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. A pedestal is checked for spread before a size is agreed.