Stone bar tops in East Village

Yes. East Village is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E20. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Newham. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. 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. Fitting a bar top is slower than carrying one. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Piece size is set by the lift car and the entrance dogleg, which routinely turns a two-piece kitchen into a three-piece one. What is called a bar in a flat like this is usually the end of a peninsula with stools pushed under it, and the projection was drawn on the layout long before anybody worked out what would carry it. A long counter is a beam before it is a surface. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join.

A rated load sounds ample until three lengths of granite and two fitters are standing on it, so the stone goes up one piece at a time. 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 bar top is the last piece in and the first one people touch. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. 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 frame is checked before anything comes off the van.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. Handover-spec kitchens are square, plumb and predictable, which means the join count is honest and driven by run length rather than by the building. 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. Nothing is assumed about a frame somebody else built. A specification repeated across several plots has to be repeatable, which quietly rules out the natural stones where no two slabs match. 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. The overhang is checked against the frame that exists.

A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. 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. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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 column in the middle of a bar is a decision, not a surprise. Send the peninsula dimensions including how far the top is meant to project, the stool count, and the internal dimensions of the service lift. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. 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. The stone is cut to the obstruction as found.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. A counter fixed back to lightweight framing takes a sideways push as well as a downward load, and framing built for neither gets noggins let into it first. What carries the overhang is fixed to structure, not to lining.

Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The carcasses stay put. Only the surface changes. Building management is often the real gate rather than the bay itself, since the barrier, the shutter and the lift each need someone with a fob. 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. A red route buys minutes and a bar top needs hours.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. 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. One level or two, and it is decided early.