Stone bar tops in Harrow Garden Village

Yes. Harrow Garden Village is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA2, HA5. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Harrow. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. 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. Fitting a bar top is slower than carrying one. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The original floor is timber over a deep ventilated void with air bricks right round the perimeter, and the extension slab butts straight up against it. 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. The break sits over support and clear of every seat. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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. Every obstruction under the top is a seating decision too.

A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. 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 waterfall end travels as its own piece and is bonded in place. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. 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. The frame is checked before anything comes off the van.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop design & quotation and worktop fabrication. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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. The evening use is what the piece is sized for. 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. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage.

It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. 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. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. 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. 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. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. 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. A fixture is drawn for the long run, not the current tenant.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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. Steel spans what a carcass cannot.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. 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. Where the original steel windows survive at the rear, the frame sits almost flush with the inside face and there is no reveal to lose a joint in. 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. A breakfast counter on an end is still an overhang problem.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. 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. The nose line is drawn first and everything works back from it.

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. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. The larder had a slate or terrazzo shelf on its cold wall, heavy enough that it usually got left in place when everything else went. 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. A bar built as furniture is templated as furniture.