Stone bar tops in Rosehill

Yes. Rosehill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SM1. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Sutton. 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 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. Packaging and offcuts go back the way the top came in. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Ceilings sit at about two point three metres and the head of the window is close under them, so a unit over the window has very little wall to hold onto. 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. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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 bar is packed level off the frame, not off the floor.

A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. 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 frame is built in the room; only the top has to travel. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. One van, one bar, one visit.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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. 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 is templated after the joinery has stopped moving. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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. The support detail is agreed with whoever builds the frame.

A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. 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 bar on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. 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 notch in a bar top is drawn with its support beside it. 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. Residents are given written notice before anyone attends, and that notice period rather than the workshop is what governs the earliest sensible start. 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. The radius on the nose is a decision, not a default.

Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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. Repeated bars get one drawing and one steel schedule.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. The gas enters at the back of the house and the pipe to the hob crosses the room at low level in a boxing along the skirting. 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.

Carcasses stay. Surface changes. That is the whole of it. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. 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. Where parking is tight the hardware walks in ahead of the stone.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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. Leaning is a sideways load and framing has to answer for it.