Stone bar tops in Mortlake

Yes. Mortlake is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW14. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. Where the drive is shared, the half-hour the van spends in the way is agreed with the neighbour in advance rather than apologised for at the time. 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. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The original larder or store cupboard usually survives in a corner, and that alcove is deeper than the units and squarer than the walls around 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. The back of a freestanding bar is finished like the front. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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.

Where a basement car park is the only way up from the parking level the carry starts below ground, and two lifts in one building rarely share the same internal dimensions. 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. 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 trade bar is fitted around opening times, so the window the van has and the window the room has are rarely the same window. A bar top left on a pavement is a bar top with a chipped nose.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. New-build kitchens are usually smaller than the plan suggests once the appliances are in, so the usable run is shorter than the drawn run. 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. The support detail is agreed with whoever builds the frame. Buyers upgrading before handover work to a choices deadline set by the sales office rather than by the build programme. 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. Repeated bars get one drawing and one steel schedule.

Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. 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. Knee room is measured from the frame, not from the nose. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

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. 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. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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 quote for a bar names who is providing the frame.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. An under-stairs cupboard eats one end of most of these kitchens, and the run stops at a door that has to keep opening. 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.

Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. 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. 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 corbel never lands where a knee goes.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The units stay where they are and only the surface changes. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. 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. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. What comes off the van first is whatever holds the top up.

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. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Standing a three-metre length on end takes more headroom outside the car than inside it, and a low lobby ceiling is what actually stops it. 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. Stools and back shelving come in after the stone is down.