Stone bar tops in Coombe (Kingston)

Yes. Coombe (Kingston) is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are KT2. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Kingston upon Thames. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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. A suspension is booked for the fitting day, not the delivery hour. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

The bay at the front and the back addition at the rear were built to different standards, and the kitchen is nearly always in the weaker of the two. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. A bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take. 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. Where the wall is bowed the rear rail takes it up.

The barrier, the entry code and the estate rules decide when a van can get near the door, and none of that is negotiable on the day. 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. The frame goes up first so the top has somewhere to land. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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. Bar tops are set once, so the day is planned to allow it.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. Where several adults share the cooking the kitchen is in use most of the day, so a fitting slot has to be agreed with more people than usual. 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. Frames get opened up again when the support was left out. Households sharing a house tend to want two prep areas rather than one, which usually means an island as well as a perimeter run. 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. Repeat detail, single survey, matched batch.

Knee room under a breakfast bar is measured from the face of the cabinets rather than from the edge of the stone, so a deep apron quietly eats the depth somebody actually gets to sit in. 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. Support follows the seating plan along the whole nose. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own 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. 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 pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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. Porcelain forgives the cleaning products a bar actually meets.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Nothing in a house of this age is square, and the kitchen is usually the part that has been altered most often. 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.

Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. A bay-fronted terrace has a long hall running past the stairs to the kitchen, so the hall turn caps the piece length before the run length does. 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. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The kitchen normally sits in the back addition or a later side return, which puts the run against the oldest and least straight wall in the building. 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. Corbels are a decision about how the piece looks from a seat.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. 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. Nothing about a front edge survives being dragged.