Stone bar tops in Anerley

Yes. Anerley is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE20. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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. Where parking is tight the hardware walks in ahead of the stone. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

Electrics went in at conversion, some in surface trunking and some chased into lath and plaster, so no cable route in these rooms is safe to assume. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Old floors move, so the bar is fixed back as well as down. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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 knee space is measured before the bracket is specified.

A pendant light hanging in the middle of a hall ceiling sets the angle a piece can be tilted to, and it is the measurement nobody thinks to take. 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. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. A bar top left on a pavement is a bar top with a chipped nose.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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. Repeat detail, single survey, matched batch. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. 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 brief changes, but the nose still has to be carried.

Peninsula tops are often the longest single piece in the kitchen, so if anything in the layout is going to force a second slab it is generally this one. 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. A radius on a walked-past corner is agreed at drawing stage. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. 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. Where the wall is bowed the rear rail takes it up. 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. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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. The person leaning on it is the person it was drawn for.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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 bar pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. The combination boiler hangs on whichever wall happened to be external, and that decision has already used up a stretch of the only wall the run wanted. 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. A bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take.

Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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. Every obstruction under the top is a seating decision too.

A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. A hall that widens further in is still only as good as its tightest point, and that point is usually within a metre of the front door. 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.