Stone bar tops in Corbets Tey

Yes. Corbets Tey is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM14. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. 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. Bar tops are set once, so the day is planned to allow it. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These have been added to over two centuries, so the kitchen is made of two or three walls of different ages and different thicknesses. There is normally room here for a genuine bar rather than a seating overhang, which means a rear counter, a small sink and a run of shelving being drawn as one piece of joinery with the stone reading across all of it. Noggins first, brackets second, stone last. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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 knee space is measured before the bracket is specified.

Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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. The drip tray and the bar sink arrive with the top, not after it. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. 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. Where the bay is timed, the support goes in first.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop design & quotation and worktop installation. 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. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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 budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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.

Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. 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. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. 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. Where the wall is bowed the rear rail takes it up. Send the bar layout with the rear counter and any sink marked, the seating side and stool count, and the edge profile you want on the front. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. 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 template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Walls that are old, thick and rarely straight make dry-laying and scribing the bulk of the day. 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. Nothing about a bar top is designed around a wall.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. 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.

Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. 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 pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard.

Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Windows are small and set deep, which leaves the run under them dark and the reveal too deep for a plain square end. Lengths run past what a single slab gives, so a break is designed in from the start, placed over support and kept clear of every stool position before anything is nested. The riser gets notched around, not built away from.