Stone bar tops in Collier Row

Yes. Collier Row is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM5. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. 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 suspension is booked for the fitting day, not the delivery hour. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Walls look modern and are not: block or breeze with a skim that has been patched over decades, so dry-laying and scribing still apply. A bar in this stock is nearly always a short breakfast counter on the end of a run, and the end is exactly the point where the load lands with the least underneath it. Old floors move, so the bar is fixed back as well as down. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. The support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out.

The van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. 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 trade bar is carried in outside trading hours or not at all. Where the drive is shared, the half-hour the van spends in the way is agreed with the neighbour in advance rather than apologised for at the time. 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. Bar tops are set once, so the day is planned to allow it.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop design & quotation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Where a single building holds several small kitchens, the work arrives as one job rather than four, and it should be cut off the same slab run so the batches genuinely 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. Repeat detail, single survey, matched batch. Small kitchens in a shared house are all short runs and tight cut-out spacing, which is more bench work per square metre than one large kitchen would be. 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.

A breakfast bar on the outer side is an overhang like any other, and the support under it is sized for people leaning on the end rather than for the weight of the stone alone. 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. Knee room is measured from the frame, not from the nose. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. A bar top will not correct a frame that is out of true. Tell us what the end of the run is built off, send the length and projection you want, and confirm whether there is rear access into the kitchen. An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. 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. Who signs off the steel is settled before it is ordered.

A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. 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. The seating side decides the piece; the wall side never does.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. Anything that puts a notch in a bar takes material out of the piece at the point people lean on it, so the notch and the support are drawn together or not at all. Fixings go into timber that was put there for them.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. A stub wall divides the kitchen from the back lobby, and it rarely stayed where the original drawing put 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. Support under the overhang comes first on the drawing.

If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. The window sits in the middle of the run over the sink, and its board and cill set the limit on how tall an upstand can be. Partitions are frequently lightweight, so anything fixed back to a wall gets noggins let into the framing before a bracket is offered up to it, and a fixing into plasterboard alone is not an option on a piece people push against. A bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take.