Stone bar tops in Becontree

Yes. Becontree is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM8, RM9. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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. What comes off the van first is whatever holds the top up. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

The kitchen has a door to the hall, a door to the garden and a window over the sink, so the continuous run is short in every direction. Rooms in this stock are compact, so a bar usually replaces a table rather than sitting alongside one, and it is drawn for two or three stools with enough floor left to get past them. The riser gets notched around, not built away from. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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 side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. 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. Where the route is tight the bar gains a join behind a corbel. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. 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 van stands for the frame as well as the top.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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 junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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.

A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. 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 bar on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. The support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out. 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. Residents are given written notice before anyone attends, and that notice period rather than the workshop is what governs the earliest sensible start. 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 support is specified for the next occupant as well.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. A bar fit is a day, not a drop.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Where the kitchen has been opened into the living room the opening was trimmed with a steel, and a stub of the old wall was left standing at one end. None of that stops a bar being fitted level, but it does mean the top is set to a datum of its own and packed off the frame rather than followed down to the floor. The underside of the nose is polished because it is looked at.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Floors are a sand and cement screed over concrete, laid fast and worn since, so they are hard, solid and seldom flat. What carries a bar top here is rarely a kitchen carcass, so the framing underneath gets looked at before anything is measured across the top of it. A bar that flexes was supported for weight it never gets.

Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Built-in stores and a fuel place beside the back door were standard, and one of them is usually still sitting in the corner of the kitchen. 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. Two tiers where a single piece will not reach.