Stone bar tops in Coombe (Croydon)

Yes. Coombe (Croydon) is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. 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. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These houses are three storeys on a small footprint, so the kitchen is on the ground floor and everything else is stacked above it. What is called a bar in a flat like this is usually the end of a peninsula with stools pushed under it, and the projection was drawn on the layout long before anybody worked out what would carry it. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not. Dot-and-dab plasterboard sounds solid and is hollow behind, so anything fixed through it has to hit a dab or a batten rather than a void. 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.

Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. 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. Nothing about a front edge survives being dragged. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. 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. Bar tops are set once, so the day is planned to allow it.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. New-build kitchens are usually smaller than the plan suggests once the appliances are in, so the usable run is shorter than the drawn run. 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. A late bar is a separate visit and the quote says so. Buyers upgrading before handover work to a choices deadline set by the sales office rather than by the build programme. 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. Nothing is assumed about a frame somebody else built.

A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. 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. Support follows the seating plan along the whole nose. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Taped internal angles in plasterboard belly at the corner, so the run picks up a few millimetres over the last 300mm and a plan-angle mitre will not close. 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. A bar top will not correct a frame that is out of true. Send the peninsula dimensions including how far the top is meant to project, the stool count, and the internal dimensions of the service lift. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Where a partition has been built off the floor screed rather than off the slab, it moves, and a mitre bonded across that corner is the first thing to open. 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 tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A downdraught extractor takes a long slot out of the middle of the piece and a motor housing out of the cabinet below it, so what sits under the top is settled before anything is cut. 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. An overhang on two sides is two separate calculations.

A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Booked delivery windows on a managed estate run to an hour, and a worktop install does not happen inside an hour. 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. The corbels go in before the top does, and both use the same door.

A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Riser panels, wall boxes and the boiler cupboard sit in fixed positions the developer will not move for a worktop. 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 top is fitted last and touched first.