Stone bar tops in Greenford Green

Yes. Greenford Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are UB6. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Ealing. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. 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 nose stays wrapped until the frame is ready for it. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

These were built in short runs of six or eight houses, so the party walls are solid brick and the rear elevation is a straight line with no outriggers. These bars nearly always land at the open end of a knocked-through kitchen and dining room, which means the piece is read from both sides and both sides get the same edge treatment rather than one being left as a cut face. A trade bar and a home bar are different pieces of work. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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.

Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. 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. Stools and back shelving come in after the stone is down. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. 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. Fitting a bar top is slower than carrying one.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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 bar in constant use is a maintenance decision as well. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. One detail across several rooms keeps the fixings the same.

The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. 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 breakfast counter and a trade bar are not the same brief. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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. 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. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. 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. What stays with the building is built to stay.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. 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. 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. A notch in a bar top is drawn with its support beside it.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. The under-stair cupboard opens off the kitchen in most of them, and its door swing is the reason a corner run stops where it does. 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. The back of a freestanding bar is finished like the front.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The old larder leaves behind a thick cold shelf and a vent brick through the outer wall, and both have to go before that wall reads flat. 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. Support under the overhang comes first on the drawing.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. The chimney breast served a back boiler and is usually still standing, so there is a shallow recess on one side of the room. The side passage means a full length can generally reach the room whole, so the break count answers to the slab and to the frame rather than to the front door. Where the walls give nothing, the bar stands on its own.