Stone bar tops in Roehampton

Yes. Roehampton is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW15. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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 red route buys minutes and a bar top needs hours. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Windows and doors were replaced across whole streets on one programme, so the kitchen window is a plastic frame in the old opening with a deep lined reveal. Rooms in this stock are compact, so a bar usually replaces a table rather than sitting alongside one, and it is drawn for two or three stools with enough floor left to get past them. Deep skirtings push the frame forward and the top covers it. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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 top will not correct a frame that is out of true.

Where only one car serves the building a breakdown on the morning halts the job outright, so the fallback route is worked out at template rather than on the landing. 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. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. Packaging and offcuts go back the way the top came in.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. 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 bar is templated after the joinery has stopped moving. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. 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 support detail is agreed with whoever builds the frame.

Peninsulas frequently land on a lightweight partition or on units that were never fixed down, and stone needs proper support under it before it goes on. 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 deep apron takes knee room away quietly. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. 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. Fixings go into timber that was put there for them. Send a photograph of every corner of the room so we can see the boxings, the length you want, and how many stools you expect to use. These kitchens tend to be compact and reasonably square, so the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines are a larger share of the total than the stone is. 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.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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 knee space is measured before the bracket is specified.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Windows sit in deep concrete reveals with a cast sill, and that reveal is usually the least square thing in the room. 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. People push against the front edge, so the front edge gets the steel.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Where the external walls have been overboarded to insulate them the room is fifty millimetres smaller than the drawing and the board sounds hollow throughout. None of that stops a bar being fitted level, but it does mean the top is set to a datum of its own and packed off the frame rather than followed down to the floor. Stool height and knee room are settled on the drawing.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. The window cill clears a worktop by very little, which settles how tall the upstand under it can be before anyone has drawn a thing. The one advantage here is the fabric: dense blockwork holds a fixing properly, which makes a wall-carried front edge realistic where a stud partition would not allow it at all. Beer lines and a glasswasher change what goes under the top.