Stone bar tops in Clerkenwell

Yes. Clerkenwell is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC1. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. 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. 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 van stands for the frame as well as the top. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The goods lift is generous and the flat entrance often is not, so the tightest point on the route is inside the flat rather than in the building. That changes the order of the job: the services are set out first, the frame is built round them, and the stone is machined to suit what is already there. Wide doors make piece length a choice rather than a limit. Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. 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. Leaning is a sideways load and framing has to answer for it.

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. 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. Nothing is leaned on a stud wall while it waits to be fitted. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. 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 bar fit is a day, not a drop.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. 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. 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. Repeat detail, single survey, matched batch. 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. The brief changes, but the nose still has to be carried.

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. 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. Support follows the seating plan along the whole nose. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. 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. Nothing under the nose is allowed to be in the way. Send the bar layout with the glasswasher, sink and waste positions marked, and tell us the route from where a van can stand to the room. A let property is specified for durability and for a fixed window, and both of those are legitimate reasons to choose differently. 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. Porcelain forgives the cleaning products a bar actually meets.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Poured screed over steel decking can fall away across a long run, so level is checked across the whole room before anything is packed. This is the stock where a bar is most often a working one, with a glasswasher, a drip tray and beer lines under it rather than a place to put a laptop. Noggins first, brackets second, stone last.

Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Exposed brick and steel is the whole job here, because neither of them presents a flat plane to scribe to. None of that stops a bar being fitted level, but it does mean the top is set to a datum of its own and packed off the frame rather than followed down to the floor. What holds the front edge up matters more than what the slab cost.

Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Ceilings are high and there are usually no wall units, so a splashback runs to whatever height is decided rather than to a cupboard. A trade counter gets cleaned with things a kitchen never sees, which is why porcelain and sintered stone come up here far more often than quartz does. The riser gets notched around, not built away from.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. 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. An overhang on two sides is two separate calculations.