Stone bar tops in Denmark Hill

Yes. Denmark Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE5. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. 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. The offcut from a bar sink leaves in the van. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The kitchen is a rear service room with a scullery and a larder off it, and both have usually survived as separate spaces. 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. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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 frame is made true before the stone is measured.

A piece carried on edge up a flight has to clear the ceiling above the stairs as well as the walls either side of it. 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 frame goes up first so the top has somewhere to land. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. 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. A suspension is booked for the fitting day, not the delivery hour.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. 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. 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. Batch work still gets its own template per room. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. A serving counter and a bar are one piece under two loads.

A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. 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. Where the two levels meet is a detail, not an afterthought. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join. 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 someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. 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.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Windows are low and wide with deep timber cills and leaded lights, so a run under one meets joinery rather than plaster. 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. A trade bar and a home bar are different pieces of work.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Retrofitted underfloor heating goes into the new part of the floor and stops at the old part, so the build-up changes partway across the room. 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. Drinks stand on it for hours, which changes the material answer.

Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. 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. Bar tops are set once, so the day is planned to allow it.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. 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. Stools need floor as well as knee room, and both are drawn.