Stone bar tops in Headstone

Yes. Headstone is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA2, HA1. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Harrow. A shared drive is only useful if the neighbour is not the one parked behind the van, so we ask which side the standing belongs to before the date is set. 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 frame is checked before anything comes off the van. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Rear windows are wide and low with a deep tiled cill, and that cill decides how tall the upstand behind the sink can be. 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. Old floors move, so the bar is fixed back as well as down. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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. What the bar wraps around is templated, never assumed square.

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. 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. Suction pads go on the polished face, never on the nose. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. 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 red route buys minutes and a bar top needs hours.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop replacement. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. 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. 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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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.

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 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. Knee room is measured from the frame, not from the nose. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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. The support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out. 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. An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. 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.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. A trade bar is fitted around opening times, so the window the van has and the window the room has are rarely the same window. Packaging and offcuts go back the way the top came in.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Suspended floors at the front meet a solid slab in the extension somewhere in the middle, and the units sit across the change. 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. What holds the front edge up matters more than what the slab cost.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. 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 will not correct a frame that is out of true.

It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. These went up as handed pairs, so in one house of the two the kitchen sits against the party wall and in the other it takes the alley side, and only one of them has an outside wall to work with. 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 bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take.