Stone bar tops in Barnsbury

Yes. Barnsbury is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N1, N7. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. A controlled parking zone means either a visitor permit sorted in advance or a suspended bay, and a suspension is applied for days ahead rather than on the morning. 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. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen occupies the ground floor of the addition with a garden door at the far end, so there is a second way in that is narrower than the front door and a great deal shorter. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. The stone is the last element of the joinery, not the first. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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. What the bar wraps around is templated, never assumed square.

A handrail that has to come off before a piece will pass is twenty minutes at the start of the day, and it goes back on the wall before we leave. 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. The frame is built in the room; only the top has to travel. 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. 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 particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. 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. 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. 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. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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.

The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. 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. An overhang on two sides is two separate calculations. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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 support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out. 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. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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 bar outlasts whoever specified it.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. 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. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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 top will not correct a frame that is out of true.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. 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. The bar is set out from the seat and worked back to the units.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Spindles and a newel cap stand proud of the string, so the usable width on a turn is measured to the handrail rather than to the wall behind it. 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. Cellar bars go down a flight, which is the harder direction.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. A separate bar in the same room still takes its services from the same run, so the waste, the socket and the water are set out with the kitchen even though the joinery is not. A foot rail is planned with the frame, not bolted on later.