Stone bar tops in Crystal Palace

Yes. Crystal Palace is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE19, SE20. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. 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. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Original walls are thick, lime-plastered and rarely straight, which makes dry-laying and scribing the bulk of the fitting day. 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. The break sits over support and clear of every seat. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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. A bar top is set to one datum along its own length.

A steep pitch shortens the tread and lengthens the reach, which leaves whoever is below carrying most of the weight for the full flight. 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 bar top is the last piece in and the first one people touch. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. 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. Steel and corbels are unloaded before the stone is.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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. The evening use is what the piece is sized for. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage.

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. 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. An overhang on two sides is two separate calculations. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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. The frame is made true before the stone is measured. 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. Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. 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. Porcelain forgives the cleaning products a bar actually meets.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. These are the multi-piece jobs, where vein direction across a join matters as much as the join itself. 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. The underside of the nose is polished because it is looked at.

Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. 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. 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.

The workmanship guarantee is the same either way. It does not extend to a material we did not supply. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. The support has to be specified to whoever is building the frame before it is boarded up, since steel let in afterwards means taking the front of the bar apart again. What was drawn and what was built are compared at template.