Stone bar tops in Figges Marsh

Yes. Figges Marsh is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR4. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. 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 bar top waits on the van until the frame is level. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Working hours are constrained by the business underneath, so noisy work has a window rather than a day. A bar in this stock is nearly always a short breakfast counter on the end of a run, and the end is exactly the point where the load lands with the least underneath it. 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. 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.

Stone goes up on edge, and it is the half-landing turn rather than the flight itself that sets the maximum piece. 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. Piece length is capped by the turn, then the support is drawn to suit. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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 licensed room sets the hours and the parking has to agree.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop fabrication. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. 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. What was drawn and what was built are compared at template.

The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand 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. One level or two, and it is decided early. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. Every obstruction under the top is a seating decision too. Tell us what the end of the run is built off, send the length and projection you want, and confirm whether there is rear access into the kitchen. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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. What stays with the building is built to stay.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. 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. Two people to a bar top, four where the nose is deep.

Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. The riser is boxed to a line the stone can follow.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Small, roughly square kitchens with a back door and a window in the middle of the run: short lengths, few joins, and a lot to work around. 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. What holds the front edge up matters more than what the slab cost.

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. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. Where the bar is going into a cellar the pieces travel downward rather than up, and carrying stone down a flight gives a crew less control over it, not more. A trade bar is carried in outside trading hours or not at all.