Stone bar tops in Wormholt

Yes. Wormholt is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W12. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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 licensed room sets the hours and the parking has to agree. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

The first kitchen units were metal and screwed straight into the blockwork, and their plugs are still in the wall behind whatever plaster went over them. Space is tight, so a bar here tends to replace a table rather than sit alongside one, and the piece is drawn for two or three stools rather than a row of them. Noggins first, brackets second, stone last. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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. 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. A polished front edge is protected from the tail lift to the frame. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. Nothing is rushed off a tail lift onto an unsupported nose.

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 templating 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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. What was drawn and what was built are compared at 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. 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 seating side decides the piece; the wall side never does. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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 notch in a bar top is drawn with its support beside it. 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. Where the provider has set the specification the material choice was made once for a great many kitchens, and the useful work is meeting it exactly rather than proposing something else on the day. 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. A home bar is chosen once, so the detail earns the conversation.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. 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. Two heights means two edge profiles and a spine between them.

Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. 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. 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.

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. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. 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. 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. Leaning is a sideways load and framing has to answer for it.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. The seating side is the part that decides the piece, because a stool at the open end puts a load on a corner that a wall would otherwise have been carrying. Clear length between the returns sets the stool count.