Stone bar tops in St Margarets

Yes. St Margarets is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW1. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. 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. One van, one bar, one visit. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Internal walls are lath and plaster on studs with heavy framing behind, so a fixing finds either nothing at all or something very solid. There is normally room here for a genuine bar rather than a seating overhang, which means a rear counter, a small sink and a run of shelving being drawn as one piece of joinery with the stone reading across all of it. Two tiers where a single piece will not reach. 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. The back of a bar is seen, so the back is finished.

A side gate hung to open outward against a fence post is narrower in use than it measures, and lifting the gate off its hinges is usually the quickest win on the route. 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. Steel for the overhang is carried in and fixed before the stone. A permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole morning. 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. Where parking is tight the hardware walks in ahead of the stone.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. The brief changes, but the nose still has to be carried. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Where the use is hard, the surface is chosen for it.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. 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. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting 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. Noggins go into a stud wall before a bar is fixed to it. Send the bar layout with the rear counter and any sink marked, the seating side and stool count, and the edge profile you want on the front. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. 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.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Floors are boards over joists with a solid floor only in the service rooms, and the two meet somewhere in the middle of the kitchen. Lengths run past what a single slab gives, so a break is designed in from the start, placed over support and kept clear of every stool position before anything is nested. Scribed at the back and free at the front.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. An island carries its own edge detail all the way round, so a mitred 100mm apron on four sides is four mitres cut, bonded and polished before the piece ever leaves the bench. 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. Nothing sits over a join that somebody leans on.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Arts and Crafts houses have deep eaves, low windows and inglenook recesses, so the kitchen has more corners and reveals than its floor area suggests. Bars in these houses run long enough to need a break, so it is placed over support and clear of every stool position before anything is nested. The stone is the last element of the joinery, not the first.

A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. 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. A bonded apron makes the piece deeper than the doorway expects.