Stone bar tops in Notting Dale

Yes. Notting Dale is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W11. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. Permit hours are what matters, not the permit itself, because a bay that frees up at six in the evening is no use for a template at ten. 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. Fitting a bar top is slower than carrying one. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

There is no back addition on these, so the kitchen is the original rear room and the run is one wall long with a door at each end of it. 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 apron is bonded on the bench, never built up in the room. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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 corbel never lands where a knee goes.

Car depth is the number that settles it wherever a piece cannot be stood upright, and most residential cars are shallower than the run they are serving. 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. A bar top is heavier than it looks because the apron is solid. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. 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. The frame is checked before anything comes off the van.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. 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. 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 serving counter and a bar are one piece under two loads. 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. 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. The steel is priced with the bar, not after it.

A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. 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. Two heights means two edge profiles and a spine between them. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. The bar is packed level off the frame, not off the floor. 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. Consent for the work sits with the freeholder or the managing body, and getting it in writing first avoids a crew arriving to a locked door. Where the person choosing it is not the person who will lean on it, the seating height is set to a standard rather than to whoever happens to be standing in the room. Nothing structural is drilled on an assumption.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. 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. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. A car ceiling at 2.2m sets the tallest thing that will stand in it, and the trap panel and light fitting take a slice off even that. 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.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. 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. Clear length between the returns sets the stool count.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. 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. A bar on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. That rear wall carries the back door and the only window, which leaves very little uninterrupted length for a sink run. 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. Piece length is capped by the way in and the support follows.