Stone bar tops in Gloucester Road

Yes. Gloucester Road is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW7. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Walls are solid brick with lime plaster and a hard skim over the top, and that skim comes away in sheets when old tiles are taken back. A bar in one of these flats is generally furniture in a reception room rather than part of a kitchen, so it is drawn alongside the skirting and the cornice and built as joinery with the stone as its final element. Wide doors make piece length a choice rather than a limit. Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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. What carries the overhang is fixed to structure, not to lining.

Blankets on the walls and a board on the floor go in before the first piece, because a scratched car becomes a bill from the managing agent long after the kitchen is finished. 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. Piece length is capped by the turn, then the support is drawn to suit. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. Trestles outside beat balancing a top on a half-built frame.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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. A late bar is a separate visit and the quote says so. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. 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. Nothing is assumed about a frame somebody else built.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. 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 length answers to the seats, not to the wall behind it. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

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. 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 corbel never lands where a knee goes. Confirm the working hours the block allows and the lift booking, and send the frame drawing with the finished height and the projection marked on it. 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. 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 overhang is signed off by whoever pays for the steel.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. 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. 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. The bar is packed level off the frame, not off the floor.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. 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. A deep apron takes knee room away quietly.

Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Sash windows sit in deep reveals with a working box behind the lining, so a run dying into one has to clear more than the plaster. A bar in a flat like this is usually furniture in a reception room rather than part of a kitchen, so it is built as joinery and the stone is the last element of it. Noggins first, brackets second, stone last.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. The seating side is the part that decides the piece, because a stool at the open end puts a load on a corner that a wall would otherwise have been carrying. Support follows the seating plan along the whole nose.