Stone bar tops in Harrow Road

Yes. Harrow Road is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W9, W10. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. 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. A licensed room sets the hours and the parking has to agree. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Where the kitchen is on the entrance level, the piece comes off the deck and turns straight in without going up or down at all. Rooms in this stock are compact, so a bar usually replaces a table rather than sitting alongside one, and it is drawn for two or three stools with enough floor left to get past them. A bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. 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. The riser is boxed to a line the stone can follow.

Handrails, mirrors and a sloping ceiling panel all eat into the usable diagonal, and none of them appear on a lift specification sheet. 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 trade bar is carried in outside trading hours or not at all. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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. Nothing is rushed off a tail lift onto an unsupported nose.

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 templating. 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. A licensed shared house has fire-door and escape-route rules that decide how and when stone can be carried through the common parts. 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 overhang is checked against the frame that exists. Four kitchens ordered together take one template visit and one delivery, and that is where the saving comes from rather than from a discount on the stone. 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. A bar in constant use is a maintenance decision as well.

A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. 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 raised tier is a second piece, priced and drawn as one. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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. Steel spans what a carcass cannot. Send a photograph of every corner of the room so we can see the boxings, the length you want, and how many stools you expect to use. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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.

An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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 window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. 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 bar top is set to one datum along its own length.

The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. A counter fixed back to lightweight framing takes a sideways push as well as a downward load, and framing built for neither gets noggins let into it first. The frame is made true before the stone is measured.

A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. A service duct runs between the kitchen and the bathroom stacked above it, and access to that duct stays open whatever the layout does. The one advantage here is the fabric: dense blockwork holds a fixing properly, which makes a wall-carried front edge realistic where a stud partition would not allow it at all. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not.

The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. A good number of these blocks are large panel system builds, where the wall is a precast unit with a grouted joint and nothing gets cut into it. 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 judged from a stool, not from the doorway.