Stone bar tops in South Beddington

Yes. South Beddington is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SM6. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Sutton. The distance from the standing to the actual kitchen door is the number that counts, since plenty of drives finish at a side gate and a garden path. 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. The bar top waits on the van until the frame is level. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

These were built in short runs of six or eight houses, so the party walls are solid brick and the rear elevation is a straight line with no outriggers. 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. A breakfast counter on an end is still an overhang problem. 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. 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. Leaning is a sideways load and framing has to answer for it.

A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. 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. Front tier and back tier are carried and set as two pieces. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. 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 licensed room sets the hours and the parking has to agree.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. Repeat detail, single survey, matched batch. 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. 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 brief changes, but the nose still has to be carried.

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. Nothing sits over a join that somebody leans on. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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. Nothing under the nose is allowed to be in the way. 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. 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. A quote for a bar names who is providing the frame.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. 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. A top with a bonded apron on the front arrives deeper than a worktop and behaves like a beam, so there is no easing it round a turn at all. Where the route is tight the bar gains a join behind a corbel.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. The under-stair cupboard opens off the kitchen in most of them, and its door swing is the reason a corner run stops where it does. The side passage is usually wide enough for a full length to reach the room, so piece length is decided by the slab and by what the frame will carry rather than by the front door. What the room will take decides the stool count.

The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. 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. Nothing is rushed off a tail lift onto an unsupported nose.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. 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. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. 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. 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. The overhang is drawn before the layout is signed off.