Stone bar tops in Tooting Graveney

Yes. Tooting Graveney 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 visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. 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. Nothing is rushed off a tail lift onto an unsupported nose. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen sits at the rear with a door to the garden and a window over the sink, so the useful run is broken into two short lengths. 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. Noggins first, brackets second, stone last. 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. 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.

The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. 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. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. 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. Two trips to the van, one for hardware and one for stone.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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.

Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. 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 flush bar is one plane and twice the overhang problem. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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 sloping floor is a problem for the stools, not the top. 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. Owner-occupied kitchens are usually being done once, which is why the edge profile, the vein direction and where a join falls are worth the conversation. 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. Fixings into structure are agreed before they are drilled.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. Anything that puts a notch in a bar takes material out of the piece at the point people lean on it, so the notch and the support are drawn together or not at all. What the bar wraps around is templated, never assumed square.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. 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. 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. The riser gets notched around, not built away from.

A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. These kitchens have usually been retiled twice and knocked through once, and both of those leave marks the worktop has to deal with. 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. The front edge takes the wear, so the front edge takes the detail.

The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. 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. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. A counter fixed back to lightweight framing takes a sideways push as well as a downward load, and framing built for neither gets noggins let into it first. The support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out.