Stone bar tops in Wimbledon Park

Yes. Wimbledon Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW19. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. 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. 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 fit is a day, not a drop. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The addition is one room wide, so the run is a galley with a door at one end and a window at the other and no wall long enough for anything else. 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 trade bar and a home bar are different pieces of work. Where the sill lands inside the height an upstand would occupy there is no upstand, and the stone either dies into the reveal or stops short of it. 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 back of a bar is seen, so the back is finished.

Counting hands matters more than counting metres on a staircase, because a piece two people lift off a van still wants three on the flight and a fourth watching the trailing corner. 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 bonded apron makes the piece deeper than the doorway expects. A bay suspension carries a fee and a notice period, and the notice period is the part that catches people out when a date moves. 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. Steel and corbels are unloaded before the stone is.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement. 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. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. One detail across several rooms keeps the fixings the same. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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 evening use is what the piece is sized for.

A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. 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 length answers to the seats, not to the wall behind it. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Casement handles and stays swing down into the space above the worktop, so the clearance that counts is the one measured with the window open. 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. Noggins go into a stud wall before a bar is fixed to 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. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. 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. Sealing a bar top is a yearly job and we say so.

Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Suction lifters earn their keep on a straight flight and become a liability on a winder, where a handle standing out from the face is one more thing to catch on a wall. 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. The frame is built in the room; only the top has to travel.

The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. 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.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. 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. Everything under the nose is agreed before a slab is chosen.

Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. 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.