Stone bar tops in Forty Hill

Yes. Forty Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EN2. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Enfield. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

There is no back addition on these, so the kitchen is the original rear room and the run is one wall long with a door at each end of it. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. A bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. 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. Noggins go into a stud wall before a bar is fixed to it.

A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. 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 drip tray and the bar sink arrive with the top, not after it. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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 overhang is checked against the frame that exists. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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 bar in constant use is a maintenance decision as well.

A downdraught extractor takes a long slot out of the middle of the piece and a motor housing out of the cabinet below it, so what sits under the top is settled before anything is cut. 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 foot rail is planned with the frame, not bolted on later. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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. A sloping floor is a problem for the stools, not the top. 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. Where the person choosing it is not the person who will lean on it, the seating height is set to a standard rather than to whoever happens to be standing in the room. What stays with the building is built to stay.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. 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. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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. What the bar wraps around is templated, never assumed square.

Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. 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.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. 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. The support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. That rear wall carries the back door and the only window, which leaves very little uninterrupted length for a sink run. 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. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not.