Stone bar tops in Tooting

Yes. Tooting 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. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. 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. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The hot water cylinder sits in a cupboard opening off the kitchen or the landing above it, and the pipework to it drops through the corner of the room. Rooms in this stock are compact, so a bar usually replaces a table rather than sitting alongside one, and it is drawn for two or three stools with enough floor left to get past them. What the room will take decides the stool count. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. 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 stone is cut to the obstruction as found.

Spindles and a newel cap stand proud of the string, so the usable width on a turn is measured to the handrail rather than to the wall behind it. 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. The nose is the corner that gets caught, so it travels padded. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. 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 particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Where an annexe has been built or converted, its floor and its walls are newer than the main house and behave differently under the same run. 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. Sintered stone earns its keep where the cleaning is harsh. Extended households run kitchens hard, and that pushes the specification towards granite or sintered stone rather than a light quartz. 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. An overhang on a plan is not an overhang with steel under it.

A peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. 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. The bar is set out from the seat and worked back to the units. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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. What carries the overhang is fixed to structure, not to lining. Send a photograph of every corner of the room so we can see the boxings, the length you want, and how many stools you expect to use. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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.

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. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Peninsula tops are often the longest single piece in the kitchen, so if anything in the layout is going to force a second slab it is generally this one. 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 foot rail is planned with the frame, not bolted on later.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. 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. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. The top step is rarely the end of it, because a door swinging out onto the landing has to be held back before a piece can come off the flight. 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. Steel for the overhang is carried in and fixed before the stone.

Nothing is payable in advance of the template. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The carry is the constraint: a single stair with tight half-landings, or deck access with a long walk from the lift. 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. A home bar is joinery first and stone second.

The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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 corbel never lands where a knee goes.