Stone bar tops in East Ham

Yes. East Ham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E6. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Newham. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. 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.

Many have had the ground floor chimney breast removed to gain three hundred millimetres, and the gained strip is newer blockwork standing proud of the old plaster. 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 cellar bar is set to the headroom first. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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 pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard.

Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. 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. Two people to a bar top, four where the nose is deep. 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. 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.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop design & quotation. 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. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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. What was drawn and what was built are compared at template.

Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. 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. An overhang on two sides is two separate calculations. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. Every obstruction under the top is a seating decision too. 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. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. 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.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. 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. The bar is set out from the seat and worked back to the units.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. 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 staircase rises over the back room in a good number of these, so a sloping bulkhead sits over one end of the run and a piece cannot be stood on edge beneath it. 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. Old floors move, so the bar is fixed back as well as down.

A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. A two-up two-down has a kitchen that was never designed to be one, so the run is short, the ceiling is low and every millimetre of depth gets argued over. Original walls give nothing straight to work to, which is why a bar here is built as its own frame and scribed at the back rather than trusted to the plaster behind it. A bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. 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. A foot rail is planned with the frame, not bolted on later.