Stone bar tops in Charlton

Yes. Charlton is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE7. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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 bar fit is a day, not a drop. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These were built with a scullery that has since been swallowed by an extension, leaving a change of floor level roughly where the run crosses. 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 bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the 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. Fixings go into timber that was put there for them.

A step up off the pavement means the piece is lifted to the threshold before it is carried anywhere, and that first lift is the one that wants four hands. 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. A trade bar is carried in outside trading hours or not at all. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. Steel and corbels are unloaded before the stone is.

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. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Frames get opened up again when the support was left out. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. Repeat detail, single survey, matched batch.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. 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. A deep apron takes knee room away quietly. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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 knee space is measured before the bracket is specified. 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. A leaseholder paying for their own kitchen inside managed stock still needs the freeholder to consent, and that consent is about the building and the common parts rather than about the worktop. 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 home bar is chosen once, so the detail earns the conversation.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Suspended timber floors flex underfoot, and anything that moves beneath a unit shows up later as a lipped join. 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. Drinks stand on it for hours, which changes the material answer.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. The carcasses stay. Only the surface changes. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. The bar top waits on the van until the frame is level.

Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. The rear room has a bay or a wide window onto the garden, so the sink length is short and the real working length is on the return. A bar in a house of this age is usually either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the cellar is the harder of the two because the headroom fixes the counter height before anybody else gets a say. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not.

Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. 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. Support follows the seating plan along the whole nose.