Stone bar tops in Bishop's Park

Yes. Bishop's Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW6. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. 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. That has to cover more than the unload, since the corbels, the flat bar and the fixings all come off the van well before the top does. Steel and corbels are unloaded before the stone is. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The addition is one room wide, so the run is a galley with a door at one end and a window at the other and no wall long enough for anything else. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Where the walls give nothing, the bar stands on its own. A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. 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. The support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out.

The front door is often the cheapest hundred millimetres on the route, because a door lifted off its hinges gives back the width its own thickness was taking. 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. Piece length is capped by the turn, then the support is drawn to suit. Streets near a ground or a venue have restrictions that come and go with the fixture list rather than with the time of day. 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. The bar top waits on the van until the frame is level.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. 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. 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 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. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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 peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. 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 raised tier is a second piece, priced and drawn as one. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. 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. 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. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. 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. Fixings into structure are agreed before they are drilled.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. An inward-opening door swinging back against the wall leaves less clear opening than the frame measures, and a storm porch in front of it is tighter again. A top with a bonded apron on the front arrives deeper than a worktop and behaves like a beam, so there is no easing it round a turn at all. Two people to a bar top, four where the nose is deep.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Peninsula tops are often the longest single piece in the kitchen, so if anything in the layout is going to force a second slab it is generally this one. Where the counter runs flush with the working surface instead of standing above it the whole thing becomes one plane, which looks better and doubles the unsupported span. The stool positions go on the drawing before the join does.

The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. The step down from the main house into the addition is commonly a hundred to a hundred and fifty millimetres, which gives the kitchen a different floor datum from the rest of the ground floor. 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 long counter is a beam before it is a surface.

An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Where the addition is single storey the ceiling follows a lean-to roof, so one side of the room loses height and a full-height panel has a sloping stop. The floor is suspended timber, so the frame is fixed back to a wall as well as bearing down on the boards, or the whole thing shifts when somebody leans on the nose. The apron is bonded on the bench, never built up in the room.