Stone bar tops in Brentham Garden Suburb

Yes. Brentham Garden Suburb is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W5. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Ealing. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. 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. Trestles outside beat balancing a top on a half-built frame. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

There is no back addition on these, so the kitchen is the original rear room and the run is one wall long with a door at each end of it. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. The frame is built to the room and the stone answers to the frame. 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. 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.

Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. Where the drive is shared, the half-hour the van spends in the way is agreed with the neighbour in advance rather than apologised for at the time. 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 offcut from a bar sink leaves in the van.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. 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. 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. The steel is priced with the bar, not after it. 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. 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. Drinks left standing decide the material more than looks do.

Where a run finishes hard against a wall the last few millimetres are scribed, and where it finishes in open floor it is cut square and polished, which is two different jobs on one length. 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. The bar is set out from the seat and worked back to the units. 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. 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. 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. 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. Seating height is set to a person or to a standard, and stated.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. A step up from the drive to the threshold turns the last two metres into a lift, and a lift is where two pairs of hands become the minimum. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. A suspension is booked for the fitting day, not the delivery hour.

Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. That rear wall carries the back door and the only window, which leaves very little uninterrupted length for a sink run. 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. A cellar bar is set to the headroom first.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Gas, waste and later wiring were boxed in against the wall long after the house was built, and that boxing is what the run has to clear. None of that stops a bar being fitted level, but it does mean the top is set to a datum of its own and packed off the frame rather than followed down to the floor. Stool height and knee room are settled on the drawing.

Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. 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. Anything that puts a notch in a bar takes material out of the piece at the point people lean on it, so the notch and the support are drawn together or not at all. The knee space is measured before the bracket is specified.