Stone bar tops in Willesden Green

Yes. Willesden Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW2, NW10. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Brent. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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. The offcut from a bar sink leaves in the van. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Many of these had a bathroom or a WC built onto the far end of the addition, so the room now ends at a stud wall rather than at the original brickwork. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not. 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 bar is packed level off the frame, not off the floor.

A side gate hung to open outward against a fence post is narrower in use than it measures, and lifting the gate off its hinges is usually the quickest win on the route. 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. Where the route is tight the bar gains a join behind a corbel. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. 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 suspension is booked for the fitting day, not the delivery hour.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop design & quotation and worktop templating. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is 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. The evening use is what the piece is sized for. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage.

An island carries its own edge detail all the way round, so a mitred 100mm apron on four sides is four mitres cut, bonded and polished before the piece ever leaves the bench. 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. Where the two levels meet is a detail, not an afterthought. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

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. A notch in a bar top is drawn with its support beside it. 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. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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. Sealing a bar top is a yearly job and we say so.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. 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. A polished front edge is protected from the tail lift to the frame.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. The back addition is frequently a single skin of brick rendered on both faces, which takes a fixing badly and moves with the weather. None of that stops a bar being fitted level, but it does mean the top is set to a datum of its own and packed off the frame rather than followed down to the floor. Everything under the nose is agreed before a slab is chosen.

Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. 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. Leaning is a sideways load and framing has to answer for it.

Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. 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. Nothing is leaned on a stud wall while it waits to be fitted.