Stone bar tops in Uxbridge

Yes. Uxbridge is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are UB8. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hillingdon. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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. Two trips to the van, one for hardware and one for stone. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Deep original skirting is often left in behind the units, standing them off the wall, so the back edge of the stone is plotted where the carcasses actually sit. 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. Noggins first, brackets second, stone last. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. A sloping floor is a problem for the stools, not the top.

A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. 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 polished front edge is protected from the tail lift to the frame. 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 trade bar is fitted around opening times, so the window the van has and the window the room has are rarely the same window. Trestles outside beat balancing a top on a half-built frame.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. 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. Four kitchens ordered together take one template visit and one delivery, and that is where the saving comes from rather than from a discount on the stone. 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. What gets leaned on gets specified for leaning. Rooms in a shared house are let individually, so the work has to be done around whoever is still living in the building. 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. Batch work still gets its own template per room.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. 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. Knee room is measured from the frame, not from the nose. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

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. 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. What the bar wraps around is templated, never assumed square. 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. Where the owner is not local, the decisions happen remotely, so photographs and a clear itemised drawing carry more weight than a showroom visit ever would. 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. Seating height is set to a person or to a standard, and stated.

Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. 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. Nothing is leaned on a stud wall while it waits to be fitted.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. These were built late enough to have a damp course and proper footings, so the front of the house is close to true and the rear addition holding the kitchen is the part that has dropped. The floor is suspended timber, so the frame is fixed back to a wall as well as bearing down on the boards, or the whole thing shifts when somebody leans on the nose. The riser gets notched around, not built away from.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. 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. 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. The support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. 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. The seating side decides the piece; the wall side never does.