Stone bar tops in Avery Hill

Yes. Avery Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE9. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. 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. Nothing is rushed off a tail lift onto an unsupported nose. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The kitchen is a small square room off a narrow entrance lobby, and the turn out of that lobby is the real limit on piece length. The one advantage here is the fabric: dense blockwork holds a fixing properly, which makes a wall-carried front edge realistic where a stud partition would not allow it at all. A trade bar and a home bar are different pieces of work. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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. Where the wall is bowed the rear rail takes it up.

The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. 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. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. 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. Two trips to the van, one for hardware and one for stone.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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 serving counter and a bar are one piece under two loads. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. 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 steel is priced with the bar, not after it.

A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. 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. Support follows the seating plan along the whole nose. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over 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. A bar pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard. 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. 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. 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 radius on the nose is a decision, not a default.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. A fob on the communal door and a shared lift mean the carry is timed rather than continuous. 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. The underside of the nose is polished because it is looked at.

Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. 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.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. 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. An overhang on two sides is two separate calculations.

Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. 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 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. Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. 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. Nothing is leaned on a stud wall while it waits to be fitted.