Stone bar tops in Dartmouth Park

Yes. Dartmouth Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW5. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Controlled hours that end in the middle of the afternoon make the second half of the day easy and put the whole problem in the first half. 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. Two trips to the van, one for hardware and one for stone. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The meters sit in the hall or under the stairs on the way through, so the carry passes a cupboard door that has to be shut and protected before anything moves. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Piece length is capped by the way in and the support follows. A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. 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. Nothing under the nose is allowed to be in the way.

Two people will walk a two-metre piece in through a front door; the same hall with a three-metre piece wants four, purely because nobody can let go halfway. 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. The drip tray and the bar sink arrive with the top, not after it. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. 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. Trestles outside beat balancing a top on a half-built frame.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation 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 family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. 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. 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.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. 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. A radius on a walked-past corner is agreed at drawing stage. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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 back of a bar is seen, so the back is finished. Send the length you want, the number of stools, and photographs walking from the pavement through to the room, including the cellar stair if the bar is going down there. Owner-occupied kitchens are usually being done once, which is why the edge profile, the vein direction and where a join falls are worth the conversation. 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.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Party wall settlement pulls the floor down at one side of the room, so a long run reads level at one end and not at the other. 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. Corbels are a decision about how the piece looks from a seat.

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. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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. Noggins go into a stud wall before a bar is fixed to it.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. The front door is often the cheapest hundred millimetres on the route, because a door lifted off its hinges gives back the width its own thickness was taking. 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. A waterfall end travels as its own piece and is bonded in place.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. 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. One level or two, and it is decided early.