Stone bar tops in Ruislip Gardens

Yes. Ruislip Gardens is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA4. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hillingdon. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. 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. Steel and corbels are unloaded before the stone is. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The chimney breast served a back boiler and is usually still standing, so there is a shallow recess on one side of the room. These bars nearly always land at the open end of a knocked-through kitchen and dining room, which means the piece is read from both sides and both sides get the same edge treatment rather than one being left as a cut face. The break sits over support and clear of every seat. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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.

The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. 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. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. 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 bar top waits on the van until the frame is level.

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. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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 the piece most likely to be added after the kitchen. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. Frames get opened up again when the support was left out.

Where a run finishes hard against a wall the last few millimetres are scribed, and where it finishes in open floor it is cut square and polished, which is two different jobs on one length. 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. A bar on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. Confirm the finished height you want and whether the bar is seen from both sides, and tell us who is building the frame and when it will be complete. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. 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.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. 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. Cellar bars go down a flight, which is the harder direction.

An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. The units below stay exactly as they are; only the surface is replaced. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. 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 licensed room sets the hours and the parking has to agree.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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.

Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A doorway partway along one wall breaks that side into two separate pieces, and two short pieces cost more between them than the single long one they replace. 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. Nothing sits over a join that somebody leans on.