Stone bar tops in East Finchley

Yes. East Finchley is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N2. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. A van waiting on a loading concession has somebody standing with it, because a vehicle left unattended is the one that collects the ticket. 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. Trestles outside beat balancing a top on a half-built frame. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

There is a solid base under the old scullery end and suspended timber where the addition meets the house, and the two part company along that joint. In a cellar the headroom fixes the counter height first and everything else works back from it, and the stair down is the tightest part of the route because stone carried downward is harder to control than stone carried up. A garage floor slopes and the frame takes that up. 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. The knee space is measured before the bracket is specified.

Where the stairwell is narrow enough that the stone travels on edge the polished face runs within an inch of the plaster, so the walls get boarded as well as the steps. 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. Piece length is capped by the turn, then the support is drawn to suit. 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. 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. The offcut from a bar sink leaves in the van.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop replacement. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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. 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. Where the use is hard, the surface is chosen for it. 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. Harder use and stronger cleaning products push the answer towards porcelain or sintered stone, because a resin-bound surface is the one that shows what has been left standing on it. A late bar is a separate visit and the quote says so.

The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. 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. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

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. 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. Where the wall is bowed the rear rail takes it up. 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. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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.

An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Stud centres are almost never where the brackets would like to be, so fixing positions get set from the framing and the stone is designed to suit. 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. A bar pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. The original range recess often survives as a shallow alcove with an iron lintel over it, a hundred millimetres deeper than the wall either side of it. 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. Deep skirtings push the frame forward and the top covers it.

A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that corner. 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. Two people to a bar top, four where the nose is deep.

A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. 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. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Ceilings in the addition are lower than in the front rooms, so the band of wall between the worktop and the wall units is shorter than the rest of the house suggests. The floor is suspended timber, so the frame is fixed back to a wall as well as bearing down on the boards, or the whole thing shifts when somebody leans on the nose. Beer lines and a glasswasher change what goes under the top.