Stone bar tops in Hook

Yes. Hook is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are KT9. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Kingston upon Thames. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. 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 red route buys minutes and a bar top needs hours. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The wall between the kitchen and the hall is load-bearing blockwork rather than a stud, so an opening through it is a lintel job and not an afternoon with a bolster. 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. The back of a freestanding bar is finished like the front. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. 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 support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out.

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. The route is measured to the deepest part of the piece. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. 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. Packaging and offcuts go back the way the top came in.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop design & quotation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. What was drawn and what was built are compared at template. 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. 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 is templated after the joinery has stopped moving.

The joint where a peninsula meets the main run wants a gable directly under it, and where the units do not offer one, steel goes in to carry that joint instead. 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. Nothing sits over a join that somebody leans on. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. 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. A bar top will not correct a frame that is out of true. 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. Managed stock usually comes with its own rules about working hours, waste, and who is allowed on site. Where the person choosing it is not the person who will lean on it, the seating height is set to a standard rather than to whoever happens to be standing in the room. The front edge takes the wear, whoever is leaning on it.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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. One van, one bar, one visit.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A side gate hung to open outward against a fence post is narrower in use than it measures, and lifting the gate off its hinges is usually the quickest win on the route. 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. Stools and back shelving come in after the stone is down.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The original units were screwed to timber grounds set into the wall, and where those were torn out the plaster was patched rather than replaced. None of that stops a bar being fitted level, but it does mean the top is set to a datum of its own and packed off the frame rather than followed down to the floor. What holds the front edge up matters more than what the slab cost.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. The kitchen was laid out to a nineteen-sixties module, so the units in it are often 500 or 550 deep and a modern carcass does not land on the same line. What carries a bar top here is rarely a kitchen carcass, so the framing underneath gets looked at before anything is measured across the top of it. Leaning weight, not saucepans, is what the piece is sized for.