Stone bar tops in Acton

Yes. Acton is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W3. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Ealing. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. A bar fit runs longer than a worktop run, because the frame, the support and the stone are three stages and only the last of them is quick. A suspension is booked for the fitting day, not the delivery hour. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Kitchens in the upper flats often sit in the return wing at half-landing level, so there are three or four steps inside the flat before the room is reached at all. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Old floors move, so the bar is fixed back as well as down. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. On a bar that counts twice over, because the same obstruction has to be cleared by the stone above it and by the knees of whoever is sitting at it. Noggins go into a stud wall before a bar is fixed to it.

Lift doors close on a timer that takes no account of somebody holding a worktop, so a pair of hands stays on the buttons at each end. That matters more on a bar than on a run, because a join forced by the way in cannot be allowed to land in the unsupported part of the nose. The frame is built in the room; only the top has to travel. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. A trade bar is fitted around opening times, so the window the van has and the window the room has are rarely the same window. Bar tops are set once, so the day is planned to allow it.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. Rooms in a shared house are let individually, so the work has to be done around whoever is still living in the building. Where the same detail is repeating across several rooms the support gets standardised once and then cut to length, which is cheaper than drawing it each time. The steel is priced with the bar, not after it. A landlord ordering several kitchens at once is buying a specification once and then repeating it, so the early decisions are worth taking slowly. Harder use and stronger cleaning products push the answer towards porcelain or sintered stone, because a resin-bound surface is the one that shows what has been left standing on it. Drinks left standing decide the material more than looks do.

On a book-matched pair the halves are laid out so the mirror line runs down the length of the piece, and once that line is set the top cannot be turned round to suit anything else. A bar laid over that is a second level rather than a wider one, so it wants a spine underneath it and a settled detail where the two heights meet. A bar top is a shape decision with steel attached to it. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. A bar top is levelled to itself rather than to what it stands on, so the packing goes into the frame and the stools take up whatever the floor is doing. A sloping floor is a problem for the stools, not the top. Send the length you want, the number of stools, and photographs walking from the pavement through to the room, including the cellar stair if the bar is going down there. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. Where the person choosing it is not the person who will lean on it, the seating height is set to a standard rather than to whoever happens to be standing in the room. The person leaning on it is the person it was drawn for.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. An under-stairs cupboard eats one end of most of these kitchens, and the run stops at a door that has to keep opening. A bar top put into a room like that is an overhang question first, because the nose has to carry people leaning on it long after the slab has stopped being interesting. Everything under the nose is agreed before a slab is chosen.

The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. Where the nose has to be carried past something fixed the support moves rather than the stone, since a corbel landing in the knee space is worse than no corbel at all. What the bar wraps around is templated, never assumed square.

If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. The partitions put in at conversion are studwork standing on the old floor, so they take a fixing well but carry nothing, and a heavy end panel needs a different answer. A bar in a house of this age is usually either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the cellar is the harder of the two because the headroom fixes the counter height before anybody else gets a say. A bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take.

Order is what matters: a slab is templated before it is cut, so an uncut slab is straightforward and one already machined for another kitchen is not. Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Shared-house kitchens take heavier use from more people than a family kitchen does, and the surface gets chosen on that basis rather than on looks. The support has to be specified to whoever is building the frame before it is boarded up, since steel let in afterwards means taking the front of the bar apart again. A bar is the piece most likely to be added after the kitchen.