Stone bar tops in Bromley Town Centre

Yes. Bromley Town Centre is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR1, BR2. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. Some zones are controlled for a short window in the middle of the day and open either side of it, which makes the timing of the visit the whole question. 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 licensed room sets the hours and the parking has to agree. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The back addition is a narrow two-storey outrigger with a single external wall, and the kitchen galley runs the length of it. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Where the walls give nothing, the bar stands on its own. 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. A bar top will not correct a frame that is out of true.

Pieces get staged in the ground floor lobby and sent up singly, which needs somewhere to stand them where nobody will walk into them. 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. A suspension only works if the cones and the notice are actually there on the morning, and now and then a car is sitting in the bay regardless. 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. Nothing is rushed off a tail lift onto an unsupported nose.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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 specification repeated across several plots has to be repeatable, which quietly rules out the natural stones where no two slabs match. 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. Where the use is hard, the surface is chosen for it. Replacing one plot years after handover is the problem nobody plans for, because a quartz colour can be reordered and a granite block cannot. 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 late bar is a separate visit and the quote says so.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. 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 foot rail is planned with the frame, not bolted on later. 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. 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. Fixings go into timber that was put there for them. 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. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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 chipped front edge can be dressed in place.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. 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. What the shape gives in length it takes back in support.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Chimney breasts are often taken out at ground level and left standing above, so the middle of the run is newer wall than the two ends of it. 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. Stool height and knee room are settled on the drawing.

Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. A long piece has to come through the front door, down the hall, round the newel post and through a doorway with a step down into the addition. In a cellar the headroom fixes the counter height first and everything else works back from it, and the stair down is the tightest part of the route because stone carried downward is harder to control than stone carried up. A long counter is a beam before it is a surface.

Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. The step and the gap at the car threshold catch a trolley wheel, so the piece comes off the trolley and goes in 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. A polished front edge is protected from the tail lift to the frame.