Stone bar tops in Barnehurst

Yes. Barnehurst is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA7. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Downstairs the hall and dining room are boarded but the kitchen was laid solid from the start, so the room sits on a different construction from the one beside it. The side passage is usually wide enough for a full length to reach the room, so piece length is decided by the slab and by what the frame will carry rather than by the front door. The back of a freestanding bar is finished like the front. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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. A corbel never lands where a knee goes.

Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. 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. Where the route is tight the bar gains a join behind a corbel. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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 particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop design & quotation. 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. 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. 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. What gets leaned on gets specified for leaning. 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. 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. Batch work still gets its own template per room.

Island units are rarely fixed to anything at first fix, so they get screwed to the floor and levelled against the perimeter run before the stone is measured at all. 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. Where the two levels meet is a detail, not an afterthought. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. 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. Confirm the finished height you want and whether the bar is seen from both sides, and tell us who is building the frame and when it will be complete. Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. 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. Fixings into structure are agreed before they are drilled.

If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. A serving counter and a bar are one piece under two loads.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. 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. A polished front edge is protected from the tail lift to the frame.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Deep timber window boards were fitted throughout and they stand proud of the plaster, so a top reaching the window meets a stepped edge rather than a flat one. A bar here usually appears at the open end of a knocked-through kitchen and dining room, where it is read from both sides and both sides have to be finished to the same standard. Where the walls give nothing, the bar stands on its own.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. Knee room under a breakfast bar is measured from the face of the cabinets rather than from the edge of the stone, so a deep apron quietly eats the depth somebody actually gets to sit in. 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. Stools need floor as well as knee room, and both are drawn.