Stone bar tops in Cheam

Yes. Cheam is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SM2, SM3. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Sutton. 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 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. The offcut from a bar sink leaves in the van. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A semi has a side passage, and whether it is wide enough to carry a piece flat and turn it in at the back door is the first thing worth measuring. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not. 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. The knee space is measured before the bracket is specified.

The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. 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 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. 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. A suspension is booked for the fitting day, not the delivery hour.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. An annexe kitchen is often built to keep a parent independent, so worktop height and reach matter as much as the material does. 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. Drinks left standing decide the material more than looks do. A family adding a self-contained unit is paying for the whole conversion, and the worktop is one line in a much longer job. 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. A bar is the piece most likely to be added after the kitchen.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. 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 deep apron takes knee room away quietly. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. Where the wall is bowed the rear rail takes it up. 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. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. 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. The support is specified for the next occupant as well.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. A bar pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. An island carries its own edge detail all the way round, so a mitred 100mm apron on four sides is four mitres cut, bonded and polished before the piece ever leaves the bench. 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. Support follows the seating plan along the whole nose.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. The original front door is narrow and the hall is often the only way in, which puts a ceiling on the longest single piece. 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. Drinks stand on it for hours, which changes the material answer.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. 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.