Stone bar tops in Brondesbury Park

Yes. Brondesbury Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW6. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Brent. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. 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. Trestles outside beat balancing a top on a half-built frame. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Original joinery is deep and stands proud of the plaster, so the run is plotted to the units rather than to the wall behind them. Lengths run past what a single slab gives, so a break is designed in from the start, placed over support and kept clear of every stool position before anything is nested. A bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. 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. A bar top will not correct a frame that is out of true.

Where the hall runs straight through to the back the piece can be walked in flat, and it is only the two door frames that have to be cleared. 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. Two people to a bar top, four where the nose is deep. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. 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. The offcut from a bar sink leaves in the van.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. A landlord ordering several kitchens at once is buying a specification once and then repeating it, so the early decisions are worth taking slowly. 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 bar is the piece most likely to be added after the kitchen. 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. 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. Frames get opened up again when the support was left out.

Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. 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. Stools need floor as well as knee room, and both are drawn. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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. Fixings go into timber that was put there for them. Send the bar layout with the rear counter and any sink marked, the seating side and stool count, and the edge profile you want on the front. An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. 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. A chipped front edge can be dressed in place.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Deep skirtings, a dado and a picture rail survive in the original rooms, so nothing sits flat to the wall without being cut around first. 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. A home bar is joinery first and stone second.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Turning a heavy piece on edge indoors needs floor space at both ends of the turn, so the hall is cleared of furniture before anything comes off the van. 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. A trade bar is carried in outside trading hours or not at all.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. 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 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. 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. The knee space is measured before the bracket is specified.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A pop-up socket in the surface is one more cut-out through the full thickness, and it wants the same clear space beneath it that a sink does. 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. The bar length answers to the seats, not to the wall behind it.