Stone bar tops in Ladbroke Grove

Yes. Ladbroke Grove is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W10, W11. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. 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. Trestles outside beat balancing a top on a half-built frame. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Kitchens in these flats are frequently in what was a bedroom or a return room, so the window is tall and its sill sits close to worktop height. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Deep skirtings push the frame forward and the top covers it. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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. A bar top is set to one datum along its own length.

Suction lifters earn their keep on a straight flight and become a liability on a winder, where a handle standing out from the face is one more thing to catch on a wall. 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. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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. The offcut from a bar sink leaves in the van.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. An overhang on a plan is not an overhang with steel under it. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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 goes in last, so it is measured last.

One leg of an L is nearly always the working run and the other little more than a landing space, but both are templated, cut and edged to the same standard. 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. 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.

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. 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. Send the length you want, the number of stools, and photographs walking from the pavement through to the room, including the cellar stair if the bar is going down there. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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 bar is permanent joinery with stone on top of it.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. 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. 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.

Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. A conversion takes kitchen waste to a stack added to the outside of the building, which fixes the sink position long before anyone draws a layout. A bar in a house of this age is usually either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the cellar is the harder of the two because the headroom fixes the counter height before anybody else gets a say. Beer lines and a glasswasher change what goes under the top.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. 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. The bar is set out from the seat and worked back to the units.

The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Timber nosings chip under a slipped edge, so the treads are covered along the whole flight rather than only at the landings. 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 route is measured to the deepest part of the piece.