Stone bar tops in Morden Park

Yes. Morden Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SM4. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. The distance from the standing to the actual kitchen door is the number that counts, since plenty of drives finish at a side gate and a garden path. 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. Where parking is tight the hardware walks in ahead of the stone. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Original quarry tiles survive under a later vinyl in many of these, and lifting the units off them shows how far the floor has fallen towards the garden end. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. The riser gets notched around, not built away from. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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 stone is cut to the obstruction as found.

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. 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. Where the way in is awkward the bar is drawn in tiers. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. 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 bar top left on a pavement is a bar top with a chipped nose.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop replacement. 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 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. An overhang on a plan is not an overhang with steel under it. 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. Harder use and stronger cleaning products push the answer towards porcelain or sintered stone, because a resin-bound surface is the one that shows what has been left standing on it. A bar goes in last, so it is measured last.

The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. 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 raised tier is a second piece, priced and drawn as one. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

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. What carries the overhang is fixed to structure, not to lining. 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. Method statements, insurance certificates and named operatives are wanted before a crew is cleared to attend, all of which is routine when it is asked for a week out. 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.

A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. 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. The frame goes up first so the top has somewhere to land.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. The outrigger shares a party wall with the addition next door for its whole length, so one long side of the kitchen is solid brick with another kitchen on the far side of it. In a cellar the headroom fixes the counter height first and everything else works back from it, and the stair down is the tightest part of the route because stone carried downward is harder to control than stone carried up. Two tiers where a single piece will not reach.

Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Where the walls have been dry-lined over the old lath there is a void behind the board and no solid fixing until a batten is found. 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. Elbows and glasses, not knives and pans.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. Where the bar is going into a cellar the pieces travel downward rather than up, and carrying stone down a flight gives a crew less control over it, not more. Nothing about a front edge survives being dragged.