Restaurant and cafe table tops in Wormholt

Yes. Wormholt is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W12. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. Pieces are staged inside before the van is moved off. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Whole streets went up to two or three plans, so the house next door has the same kitchen and forty years of extensions have made none of them measure the same. The trade in this stock is a row of units under a block: a roller shutter, a shallow room behind it and a paved forecourt in front with bollards across the approach. The room is handed back laid up, whatever the building. 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. 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. Room by room, since no two of them are the same.

The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. 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. The turn is measured for the frame, not for a person. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. The pavement stays walkable while the frames come off.

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. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. The bases usually stay and only the pieces change. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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 refit is a resurface where the pedestals are sound.

Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. 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 long communal piece is a slab-length question. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

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. 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. Nothing is scribed, because nothing meets a wall. Tell us how close a van can get to the door, and whether the tables have to be moved regularly, since that decides the thickness before anything else does. Where a landlord or housing provider is involved there is a specification to meet and a process to follow, and both are settled before a date is offered. 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. A short term does not justify a surface that fails early.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. 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. Shapes are drawn rather than described.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. 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. 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. Levelled at the feet, never packed under the stone.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. Floors are a sand and cement screed over concrete, laid fast and worn since, so they are hard, solid and seldom 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. Cut to your bases rather than to a size off a list.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. Wrapping stays on until the pedestal is standing.