Stone bar tops in Notting Hill

Yes. Notting Hill 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. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. 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 van stands for the frame as well as the top. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

The rear room has a bay or a wide window onto the garden, so the sink length is short and the real working length is on the return. 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. A garage floor slopes and the frame takes that up. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. 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 bar pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard.

A Victorian hall arch sits lower than the ceiling either side of it, and it is the point a piece carried on edge meets first. 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 corbels go in before the top does, and both use the same door. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. 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 fit is a day, not a drop.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Batch work still gets its own template per room. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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 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. 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. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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. Every obstruction under the top is a seating decision too. 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. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. 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.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. Steel and corbels are unloaded before the stone is.

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. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. 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.

Say what you have and where it came from before anything is booked, because thickness and batch decide what can be done with it. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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.