Stone bar tops in Hampton

Yes. Hampton is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW12. 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. 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. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The party wall is the straightest surface in the house and everything else has moved away from it over a century. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. A long counter is a beam before it is a surface. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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. Steel spans what a carcass cannot.

A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. 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. A bar top is heavier than it looks because the apron is solid. 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. 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 especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop templating and worktop installation. 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. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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 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. 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. The evening use is what the piece is sized for.

It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. 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. What the shape gives in length it takes back in support. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. A bar top is set to one datum along its own length. Send the length you want, the number of stools, and photographs walking from the pavement through to the room, including the cellar stair if the bar is going down there. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. 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. Sealing a bar top is a yearly job and we say so.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. 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. Where the way in is awkward the bar is drawn in tiers.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. 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. The frame is checked before anything comes off the van.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Ceilings are generous and the rooms are narrow, so the runs are long, the aisle is tight and there is nowhere to stand a slab on edge. 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. Nothing about a bar top is designed around a wall.

Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. These were built with a scullery that has since been swallowed by an extension, leaving a change of floor level roughly where the run crosses. In a cellar the headroom fixes the counter height first and everything else works back from it, and the stair down is the tightest part of the route because stone carried downward is harder to control than stone carried up. The apron is bonded on the bench, never built up in the room.