Stone bar tops in Friern Barnet

Yes. Friern Barnet is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N11. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. 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. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Internal walls are lath on timber studs while the flank walls are brick, so two walls in the same kitchen take a fixing completely differently. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Scribed at the back and free at the front. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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. Every obstruction under the top is a seating decision too.

Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. 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 nose is the corner that gets caught, so it travels padded. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. 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 really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop installation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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. What was drawn and what was built are compared at template. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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 bar is templated after the joinery has stopped moving.

A doorway partway along one wall breaks that side into two separate pieces, and two short pieces cost more between them than the single long one they replace. 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. One level or two, and it is decided early. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. 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. The riser is boxed to a line the stone can follow. 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. 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. What stays with the building is built to stay.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Nothing in a house of this age is square, and the kitchen is usually the part that has been altered most often. 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. A home bar is joinery first and stone second.

Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. 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. Steel spans what a carcass cannot.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. Sign-in at the gate, a permit on the dash and a named contact are usually wanted before anything comes off the van. 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. Steel for the overhang is carried in and fixed before the stone.

An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Handles on opposing runs meet in the middle of the aisle, so a deep edge profile specified on both sides takes width out of the standing space twice over. 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. A breakfast counter and a trade bar are not the same brief.