Stone bar tops in Bickley

Yes. Bickley is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR1. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. 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. Trestles outside beat balancing a top on a half-built frame. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These houses usually sit in their own grounds with a long approach, so the carry from van to door is longer than anything inside the building. There is normally room here for a genuine bar rather than a seating overhang, which means a rear counter, a small sink and a run of shelving being drawn as one piece of joinery with the stone reading across all of it. Old floors move, so the bar is fixed back as well as down. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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 back of a bar is seen, so the back is finished.

A hall radiator or a coat hook at shoulder height takes a hundred millimetres off the usable width, and a hundred millimetres is often the entire margin. 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. Piece length is capped by the turn, then the support is drawn to suit. A shared drive is only useful if the neighbour is not the one parked behind the van, so we ask which side the standing belongs to before the date is set. 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. The offcut from a bar sink leaves in the van.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. Extended households run kitchens hard, and that pushes the specification towards granite or sintered stone rather than a light quartz. 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. Batch work still gets its own template per room. Two households cooking in one kitchen means two of most things, and the run has to carry a second sink or a second oven without losing its working 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. A serving counter and a bar are one piece under two loads.

It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. 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. Where the two levels meet is a detail, not an afterthought. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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. Noggins go into a stud wall before a bar is fixed to it. Send the bar layout with the rear counter and any sink marked, the seating side and stool count, and the edge profile you want on the front. 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. 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. Seating height is set to a person or to a standard, and stated.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. These kitchens carry two ovens, a wine cabinet and a boiling tap, so the cut-out count runs well ahead of what the length of the runs suggests. 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. Corbels are a decision about how the piece looks from a seat.

A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. 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. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Where the hall runs straight through to the back the piece can be walked in flat, and it is only the two door frames that have to be cleared. 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. Two people to a bar top, four where the nose is deep.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Turning a heavy piece on edge indoors needs floor space at both ends of the turn, so the hall is cleared of furniture before anything comes off the van. Where the bar is going into a cellar the pieces travel downward rather than up, and carrying stone down a flight gives a crew less control over it, not more. A trade bar is carried in outside trading hours or not at all.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Original joinery is deep and stands proud of the plaster, so the run is plotted to the units rather than to the wall behind them. Lengths run past what a single slab gives, so a break is designed in from the start, placed over support and kept clear of every stool position before anything is nested. A bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take.