Stone bar tops in Little Venice

Yes. Little Venice is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W9. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. 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 stone comes off last because it goes down last. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

A townhouse is tall and narrow with the kitchen at the bottom, so every piece goes down a staircase rather than along a hall. There is normally room here for a genuine bar rather than a seating overhang, which means a rear counter, a small sink and a run of shelving being drawn as one piece of joinery with the stone reading across all of it. A bar built as furniture is templated as furniture. 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. The frame is made true before the stone is measured.

Every internal doorway on the way through is another frame to clear, and internal doors come off their hinges rather than being propped open. 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. Where the way in is awkward the bar is drawn in tiers. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. 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 short unload is still a long fit on a bar.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. 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. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. 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. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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.

The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. 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. A flush bar is one plane and twice the overhang problem. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

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. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join. Send the bar layout with the rear counter and any sink marked, the seating side and stool count, and the edge profile you want on the front. A quartz sample left on the counter for a week under the actual kitchen lights settles more arguments than any showroom, and an owner is the only person in a position to do that. 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. The front edge takes the wear, whoever is leaning on it.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. A suspension is charged by the bay and by the day, so the number of metres asked for is worth getting right the first time. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. Permits are sorted before a corbel is drilled.

If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. 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. 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. A column in the middle of a bar is a decision, not a surprise.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A pendant light hanging in the middle of a hall ceiling sets the angle a piece can be tilted to, and it is the measurement nobody thinks to take. 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 frame goes up first so the top has somewhere to land.

A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. 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. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. 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. Knee room is measured from the frame, not from the nose.