Stone bar tops in Burnt Oak

Yes. Burnt Oak is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA8. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. 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. The stone comes off last because it goes down last. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

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. Space is tight, so a bar here tends to replace a table rather than sit alongside one, and the piece is drawn for two or three stools rather than a row of them. Scribed at the back and free at the front. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. 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 sloping floor is a problem for the stools, not the top.

Every internal doorway on the way through is another frame to clear, and internal doors come off their hinges rather than being propped open. 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. Two people to a bar top, four where the nose is deep. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. 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. A short unload is still a long fit on a bar.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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. Drinks left standing decide the material more than looks do. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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 bar is the piece most likely to be added after the kitchen.

Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. 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.

The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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. What the bar wraps around is templated, never assumed square. 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. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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. A chipped front edge can be dressed in place.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. The balcony door frequently opens off the kitchen, which puts a threshold, a draught and a well-used route through one end of the run. 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. A bar that flexes was supported for weight it never gets.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. 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. What the shape gives in length it takes back in support.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. 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. Permits are sorted before a corbel is drilled.

How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. Order is what matters: a slab is templated before it is cut, so an uncut slab is straightforward and one already machined for another kitchen is not. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. The support has to be specified to whoever is building the frame before it is boarded up, since steel let in afterwards means taking the front of the bar apart again. Frames get opened up again when the support was left out.