Stone bar tops in Hayes

Yes. Hayes is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR2. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. 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. 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. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Post-war terraces have a short straight hall to the kitchen, which is a good deal kinder than the houses they replaced. 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. A long counter is a beam before it is a surface. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. 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.

Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. 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. Suction pads go on the polished face, never on the nose. 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. 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.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop replacement. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. What was drawn and what was built are compared at template.

With three walls in play the chance of one of them being out of square is high, and the template has to carry all three angles. 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 flush bar is one plane and twice the overhang problem. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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. 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. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. The advantage of a U is that every join can be put over a gable in a corner, so nothing lands in the middle of a clear length. 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. Knee room is measured from the frame, not from the nose.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. The short run at the head of a U usually sits under a window, so that piece is scribed on three sides at once and has nowhere left to be pushed back to. A separate bar in the same room still takes its services from the same run, so the waste, the socket and the water are set out with the kitchen even though the joinery is not. The seating side decides the piece; the wall side never does.

The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. 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. 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. A bar is templated after the joinery has stopped moving.

An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Garden routes carry their own hazards: a drain cover, a step up to a patio, wet decking, or a lawn that will not take a loaded trolley. 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. The route is measured to the deepest part of the piece.