Stone bar tops in Norbury

Yes. Norbury is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW16. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. 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. A bar top left on a pavement is a bar top with a chipped nose. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Where the side return has been filled in, the old external wall is now an internal one and still carries its render, its gutter line and its old fixings. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Two tiers where a single piece will not reach. 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. 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. What carries the overhang is fixed to structure, not to lining.

Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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. The nose is the corner that gets caught, so it travels padded. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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. What comes off the van first is whatever holds the top up.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands 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. 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. 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 goes in last, so it is measured last. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. What gets leaned on gets specified for leaning.

Handles on opposing runs meet in the middle of the aisle, so a deep edge profile specified on both sides takes width out of the standing space twice over. 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. The seating side decides the piece; the wall side never does. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

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. 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 corbel never lands where a knee goes. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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 radius on the nose is a decision, not a default.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. 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. The seating side is the side the piece is drawn from.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. 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. Steel for the overhang is carried in and fixed before the stone.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. The van stands for the frame as well as the top.

An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Older houses put the boiler or the meter on one of the two walls, and whatever is boxed in around it sets the point where that run has to stop. 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. Two heights means two edge profiles and a spine between them.