Stone bar tops in Ickenham

Yes. Ickenham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are UB10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hillingdon. A step up from the drive to the threshold turns the last two metres into a lift, and a lift is where two pairs of hands become the minimum. 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. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen is usually a rear room extended into the garden, with the original external wall now standing inside the run. 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. What the room will take decides the stool count. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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 frame is made true before the stone is measured.

Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. Nothing about a front edge survives being dragged. Where the van cannot turn on the plot it has to arrive already facing the right way, so the approach along the street is part of the plan. 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 particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as 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. A bar is templated after the joinery has stopped moving. 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. The support detail is agreed with whoever builds the frame.

On a book-matched pair the halves are laid out so the mirror line runs down the length of the piece, and once that line is set the top cannot be turned round to suit anything else. 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 radius on a walked-past corner is agreed at drawing stage. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join. 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. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. 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. Sealing a bar top is a yearly job and we say so.

Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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 corbels go in before the top does, and both use the same door.

If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Where the side return has been filled in, one side of the new room is old brick and the other is new blockwork, and the two do not behave alike. 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. Leaning weight, not saucepans, is what the piece is sized for.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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 column in the middle of a bar is a decision, not a surprise.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. The seating side is the part that decides the piece, because a stool at the open end puts a load on a corner that a wall would otherwise have been carrying. One level or two, and it is decided early.