Stone bar tops in De Beauvoir Town

Yes. De Beauvoir Town is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N1. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. A suspension is charged by the bay and by the day, so the number of metres asked for is worth getting right the first time. 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. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Rooms are tall with deep window reveals, and a run finishing into a reveal is templated to it rather than assumed square. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. The stone is the last element of the joinery, not the first. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. Where the wall is bowed the rear rail takes it up.

A Victorian hall arch sits lower than the ceiling either side of it, and it is the point a piece carried on edge meets first. 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. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. 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 particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. 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. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. 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 bar top is a shape decision with steel attached to it. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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. 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. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. 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. The corbel is on show, so it is chosen rather than supplied.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. 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. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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. Every obstruction under the top is a seating decision too.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. 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. Where the two levels meet is a detail, not an afterthought.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Listing and conservation conditions apply to a good number of these, which constrains what can be altered around the kitchen rather than what goes on top of the units. A bar in a house of this age is usually either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the cellar is the harder of the two because the headroom fixes the counter height before anybody else gets a say. A cellar bar is set to the headroom first.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. A meter cupboard set into the hall wall narrows the run at exactly the height a carried piece travels. 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.