Stone bar tops in Clapham Old Town

Yes. Clapham Old Town is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW4. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. 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. Two trips to the van, one for hardware and one for stone. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A basement kitchen has a flagged or concrete floor laid straight onto the ground, so it is solid, cold and rarely within ten millimetres of level. In a cellar the headroom fixes the counter height first and everything else works back from it, and the stair down is the tightest part of the route because stone carried downward is harder to control than stone carried up. Two tiers where a single piece will not reach. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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.

Timber nosings chip under a slipped edge, so the treads are covered along the whole flight rather than only at the landings. 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. Nothing is leaned on a stud wall while it waits to be fitted. A bay suspension carries a fee and a notice period, and the notice period is the part that catches people out when a date moves. 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. Trestles outside beat balancing a top on a half-built frame.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop templating and worktop fabrication. 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. 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. Repeat detail, single survey, matched batch. 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 brief changes, but the nose still has to be carried.

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. 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. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. 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. Porcelain forgives the cleaning products a bar actually meets.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. 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. Drinks stand on it for hours, which changes the material answer.

Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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 pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Some zones are controlled for a short window in the middle of the day and open either side of it, which makes the timing of the visit the whole question. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. The offcut from a bar sink leaves in the van.

An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. 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.