Stone bar tops in Cubitt Town

Yes. Cubitt Town is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E14. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. 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. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

These buildings have firm rules about what can be propped open, left in a lobby or carried through the residents entrance. 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. Where the walls give nothing, the bar stands on its own. 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. 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 will not correct a frame that is out of true.

Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. 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. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop design & quotation. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. 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. The brief changes, but the nose still has to be carried. 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. Where the use is hard, the surface is chosen for it.

An island carries its own edge detail all the way round, so a mitred 100mm apron on four sides is four mitres cut, bonded and polished before the piece ever leaves the bench. 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. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

An unsupported overhang off a stud wall wants noggins fixed between the studs before the boarding goes on, and once it is boarded and skimmed that option has gone. 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. Fixings go into timber that was put there for them. Send the peninsula dimensions including how far the top is meant to project, the stool count, and the internal dimensions of the service lift. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. 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.

Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. 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 waterfall end travels as its own piece and is bonded in place.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Waterfall ends are cut in sequence off the length either side of the top so the vein carries down the leg, and that sequence is gone the moment a piece has to be recut. 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 bar is set out from the seat and worked back to the units.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. The kitchen usually sits along the internal spine of the plan with the glazing at the far end, so the run itself has no window and no daylight on it. The carcasses are thin cam-lock boxes that will not take a leaning load on their own, so flat steel is let into them flush with the top of the frame before any stone goes on, rather than corbels being screwed to the front afterwards. A long counter is a beam before it is a surface.

Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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. The stone comes off last because it goes down last.