Stone bar tops in Tooting Bec

Yes. Tooting Bec is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW17. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. A suspension only works if the cones and the notice are actually there on the morning, and now and then a car is sitting in the bay regardless. 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. A bar top left on a pavement is a bar top with a chipped nose. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

The original larder or store cupboard usually survives in a corner, and that alcove is deeper than the units and squarer than the walls around it. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. A breakfast counter on an end is still an overhang problem. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. Noggins go into a stud wall before a bar is fixed to it.

Every internal doorway on the way through is another frame to clear, and internal doors come off their hinges rather than being propped open. 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. Cellar bars go down a flight, which is the harder direction. Where the permit is a digital session rather than a paper one, somebody in the house has to start it at the hour the van actually arrives. 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. What comes off the van first is whatever holds the top up.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Nothing is assumed about a frame somebody else built. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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 overhang is checked against the frame that exists.

Knee room under a breakfast bar is measured from the face of the cabinets rather than from the edge of the stone, so a deep apron quietly eats the depth somebody actually gets to sit in. 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. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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. A sloping floor is a problem for the stools, not the top. Send the length you want, the number of stools, and photographs walking from the pavement through to the room, including the cellar stair if the bar is going down there. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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 corbel is on show, so it is chosen rather than supplied.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. A cast iron soil stack runs down the outside of the rear wall, so moving the sink means a fresh penetration through solid brick. A bar top put into a room like that is an overhang question first, because the nose has to carry people leaning on it long after the slab has stopped being interesting. What holds the front edge up matters more than what the slab cost.

Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Rear rooms of this date have a wide sash or a pair of garden doors, so a good deal of the wall the run wants is glass. In a cellar the headroom fixes the counter height first and everything else works back from it, and the stair down is the tightest part of the route because stone carried downward is harder to control than stone carried up. A bar built as furniture is templated as furniture.

An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Three stools along one side need more clear length than most plans allow, and once the seating depth is fixed the piece either grows or it loses a seat. 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.

The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Internal walls are lath on timber studs while the flank walls are brick, so two walls in the same kitchen take a fixing completely differently. A bar in a house of this age is usually either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the cellar is the harder of the two because the headroom fixes the counter height before anybody else gets a say. What the room will take decides the stool count.