Stone bar tops in Ham

Yes. Ham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW10. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. 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 offcut from a bar sink leaves in the van. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Ceiling heights dropped after the war, so there is less wall between the worktop and the wall units than in anything older. 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. The back of a freestanding bar is finished like the front. Stud centres are almost never where the brackets would like to be, so fixing positions get set from the framing and the stone is designed to suit. 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. Every obstruction under the top is a seating decision too.

A height barrier on the car park entrance rules out a tail-lift van outright, and the stone then transfers to a trolley at the barrier itself. 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. A bonded apron makes the piece deeper than the doorway expects. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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 suspension is booked for the fitting day, not the delivery hour.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. 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. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. One detail across several rooms keeps the fixings the same. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. The evening use is what the piece is sized for.

Peninsulas frequently land on a lightweight partition or on units that were never fixed down, and stone needs proper support under it before it goes on. 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. Nothing sits over a join that somebody leans on. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A partition that gives when you lean on it will give under someone sitting at an overhang, and a bonded mitre nearby is where that movement shows first. 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 riser is boxed to a line the stone can follow. 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. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. 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.

Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Concierge buildings want the goods entrance, a booked lift and proof of insurance, all of which is straightforward when it is asked for a week out. 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. The frame is built in the room; only the top has to travel.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Post-war terraces have a short straight hall to the kitchen, which is a good deal kinder than the houses they replaced. A bar here is nearly always a short breakfast counter on the end of a run, and the end is exactly where the load lands with least underneath it. Where the walls give nothing, the bar stands on its own.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Because a peninsula is seen from both sides, the underside of any overhang gets the same edge treatment as the top, which is easy to leave out of a spec. 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. The overhang is drawn before the layout is signed off.

Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. 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. A boiler hangs on the wall above the run in most of these, and its pipework drops exactly where a splashback wants to go. 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. A bar top is a structural piece with a polished face on it.