Stone bar tops in Canning Town

Yes. Canning Town is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E16. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Newham. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. 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. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A drying balcony opened off the kitchen originally and many have since been glazed in, which turns an external wall into an internal one with the old threshold still in it. 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. Where the walls give nothing, the bar stands on its own. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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. Every obstruction under the top is a seating decision too.

A goods lift booked by the hour puts a clock on the whole delivery, so pieces go up in a planned order and nothing is handled twice. 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. Where a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. 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 van stands for the frame as well as the top.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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 bar is the piece most likely to be added after the kitchen. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. Frames get opened up again when the support was left out.

Where a run finishes hard against a wall the last few millimetres are scribed, and where it finishes in open floor it is cut square and polished, which is two different jobs on one length. 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 alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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 riser is boxed to a line the stone can follow. 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. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. 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. Porcelain forgives the cleaning products a bar actually meets.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. The original units were screwed to timber grounds set into the wall, and where those were torn out the plaster was patched rather than replaced. 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. What the frame does under the stone is half the job.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. The lift is only part of the route, and the corridor from the lobby to the flat door often holds a tighter turn than the car does. 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. Nothing is leaned on a stud wall while it waits to be fitted.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A doorway partway along one wall breaks that side into two separate pieces, and two short pieces cost more between them than the single long one they replace. 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.

A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Handles on opposing runs meet in the middle of the aisle, so a deep edge profile specified on both sides takes width out of the standing space twice over. 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. The nose line is drawn first and everything works back from it.