Stone bar tops in East Sheen

Yes. East Sheen is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW14. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. 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. Where the bay is timed, the support goes in first. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

There is a chimney breast on each flank wall, and the one in the kitchen carried a boiler flue rather than a fireplace, so the recess beside it is shallow. The side passage is usually wide enough for a full length to reach the room, so piece length is decided by the slab and by what the frame will carry rather than by the front door. A garage floor slopes and the frame takes that up. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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 frame is made true before the stone is measured.

A side gate hung to open outward against a fence post is narrower in use than it measures, and lifting the gate off its hinges is usually the quickest win on the route. 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. Two people to a bar top, four where the nose is deep. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. 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 stone comes off last because it goes down last.

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 installation and worktop templating. 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. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. Where the use is hard, the surface is chosen for it. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. A late bar is a separate visit and the quote says so.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. 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 is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join. Confirm the finished height you want and whether the bar is seen from both sides, and tell us who is building the frame and when it will be complete. Owner-occupied kitchens are usually being done once, which is why the edge profile, the vein direction and where a join falls are worth the conversation. 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 corbel is on show, so it is chosen rather than supplied.

The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Suspended floors at the front meet a solid slab in the extension somewhere in the middle, and the units sit across the change. 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. Where the weight lands is worked out before the piece is cut.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. The units are untouched. Only the top of them changes. 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. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. A short unload is still a long fit on a bar.

Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. The original floor is timber over a deep ventilated void with air bricks right round the perimeter, and the extension slab butts straight up against it. A bar here usually appears at the open end of a knocked-through kitchen and dining room, where it is read from both sides and both sides have to be finished to the same standard. Deep skirtings push the frame forward and the top covers it.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. The rear extension is usually the newest and truest part of the building, so it is the older half of the kitchen that gives the trouble. 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. The nose is designed before the colour is.