Stone bar tops in Between the Commons

Yes. Between the Commons is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW11. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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. Where parking is tight the hardware walks in ahead of the stone. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Many of these had a bathroom or a WC built onto the far end of the addition, so the room now ends at a stud wall rather than at the original brickwork. 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. Where the walls give nothing, the bar stands on its own. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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. The support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out.

Where the turn inside is tight the piece gets turned on the path and brought in already on edge, which needs room in front of the door as well as behind it. 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 bar top is the last piece in and the first one people touch. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. 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. A bar top left on a pavement is a bar top with a chipped nose.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, 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. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. A bar is nearly always the last thing added to a project, so it is templated on a visit of its own once the joinery around it has stopped moving. A serving counter and a bar are one piece under two loads. 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. 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. The steel is priced with the bar, not after it.

It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. 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. Where the two levels meet is a detail, not an afterthought. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. 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 bar top will not correct a frame that is out of true. 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. 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 home bar is discretionary work, so the edge profile, the corbel detail and the radius on the nose are worth settling properly rather than defaulting to whatever is quickest. Fixings into structure are agreed before they are drilled.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Injected damp courses and re-rendered lower walls leave the bottom metre standing proud of everything above it. 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. People push against the front edge, so the front edge gets the steel.

Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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. Fixings go into timber that was put there for them.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. 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. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Everything comes through the front door and down the hall, so the tightest point on the route is usually the newel post at the foot of the stairs. The steel and the corbels travel that same route and go in first, so a bar is three separate carries into one room rather than a single delivery. Piece length is capped by the turn, then the support is drawn to suit.

Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. The seating side is the part that decides the piece, because a stool at the open end puts a load on a corner that a wall would otherwise have been carrying. Stools need floor as well as knee room, and both are drawn.