Stone bar tops in Green Street Green

Yes. Green Street Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR6. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. 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. Permits are sorted before a corbel is drilled. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

A boiler in a cupboard on the kitchen wall is normal in this stock, and its position is fixed by its flue. Partitions are frequently lightweight, so anything fixed back to a wall gets noggins let into the framing before a bracket is offered up to it, and a fixing into plasterboard alone is not an option on a piece people push against. A trade bar and a home bar are different pieces of work. 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. 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 sloping floor is a problem for the stools, not the top.

Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. Stools and back shelving come in after the stone is down. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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 nose stays wrapped until the frame is ready for it.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop design & quotation. 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. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. A bar is templated after the joinery has stopped moving. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. The support detail is agreed with whoever builds the frame.

A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. 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. The bar length answers to the seats, not to the wall behind it. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. 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. What the bar wraps around is templated, never assumed square. Tell us what the end of the run is built off, send the length and projection you want, and confirm whether there is rear access into the kitchen. Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. 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.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. 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 deep apron takes knee room away quietly.

An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. The units stay where they are and only the surface changes. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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. Fitting a bar top is slower than carrying one.

Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. 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 support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out.

Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Ceiling heights dropped after the war, so there is less wall between the worktop and the wall units than in anything older. A bar here is nearly always a short breakfast counter on the end of a run, and the end is exactly where the load lands with least underneath it. The back of a freestanding bar is finished like the front.