Stone bar tops in Surbiton

Yes. Surbiton is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are KT6. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Kingston upon Thames. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. 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. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

There is usually a rounded internal corner where the plan turns, and stone does not follow a curve without being cut to it. Thick walls and deep skirtings stand the frame off the plaster, and the top is drawn to cover that gap rather than the frame being forced back into it. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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.

Suction lifters earn their keep on a straight flight and become a liability on a winder, where a handle standing out from the face is one more thing to catch on a wall. 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. A bar top will not be flexed round a turn, however light it looks. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. 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 bar top left on a pavement is a bar top with a chipped nose.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating 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. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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. An overhang on a plan is not an overhang with steel under it. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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 goes in last, so it is measured last.

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. 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 top is a shape decision with steel attached to it. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. Confirm the working hours the block allows and the lift booking, and send the frame drawing with the finished height and the projection marked on it. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. 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 home bar is chosen once, so the detail earns the conversation.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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. What gets leaned on gets specified for leaning.

The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. What comes off the van first is whatever holds the top up.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Timber nosings chip under a slipped edge, so the treads are covered along the whole flight rather than only at the landings. 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. The nose is the corner that gets caught, so it travels padded.

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. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. 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. Where the two levels meet is a detail, not an afterthought.