Stone bar tops in Kenley

Yes. Kenley is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR8. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. 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. A red route buys minutes and a bar top needs hours. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Where the roof has been converted there is usually a steel over the kitchen that went in after the walls, and the run beneath it is worth checking for square. 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. Noggins first, brackets second, stone last. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. Steel spans what a carcass cannot.

Once a long piece is in on the diagonal there is no room left for anyone else, so it travels up alone and is met on the landing above. 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. The drip tray and the bar sink arrive with the top, not after it. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. 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.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement. 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. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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.

Corner sinks and corner hobs sit exactly where the joint wants to be, so on an L the cut-out positions get settled before the join positions do. 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. An overhang on two sides is two separate calculations. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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 is set to one datum along its own length. 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. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. 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. Consent for a structural fixing comes before the fitting date.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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. The frame is made true before the stone is measured.

Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join.

Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Two runs and a return into a rear extension is the pattern, and the return is the piece that never nests neatly on a slab. 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. Leaning weight, not saucepans, is what the piece is sized for.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. The kitchen sits at the back with a door to the garden and a window over the sink, and both are on the wall the run wants. 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. The riser gets notched around, not built away from.