Stone bar tops in Addiscombe

Yes. Addiscombe is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. Permit hours are what matters, not the permit itself, because a bay that frees up at six in the evening is no use for a template at ten. 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. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The rear door swings inward across the end of the run, so the last few hundred millimetres of worktop are only reachable with the door shut. 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. 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. A sloping floor is a problem for the stools, not the top.

A step up off the pavement means the piece is lifted to the threshold before it is carried anywhere, and that first lift is the one that wants four hands. 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. Nothing is leaned on a stud wall while it waits to be fitted. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. 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 to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. A bar goes in last, so it is measured last. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. What gets leaned on gets specified for leaning.

The wall between the original room and the return usually carries a steel, and the plaster line above it steps, so anything full height behind the run is measured separately from the top. 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 stool positions go on the drawing before the join does. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. 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. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. 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 person leaning on it is the person it was drawn for.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The kitchen normally sits in the back addition or a later side return, which puts the run against the oldest and least straight wall in the building. 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 bar top is a structural piece with a polished face on it.

The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Sash windows in the addition sit low and the sill can land under standard worktop height, so the top is notched round it or the run stops short of it. 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. The back of a freestanding bar is finished like the front.

An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. 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 trade bar is fitted around opening times, so the window the van has and the window the room has are rarely the same window. The bar top waits on the van until the frame is level.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. A Victorian hall arch sits lower than the ceiling either side of it, and it is the point a piece carried on edge meets first. 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 bar top is the last piece in and the first one people touch.