Stone bar tops in Grove Park

Yes. Grove Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE12. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. A shared drive is only useful if the neighbour is not the one parked behind the van, so we ask which side the standing belongs to before the date is set. 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 nose stays wrapped until the frame is ready for it. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Original quarry-tiled floors sit lower than a later screed, so a run crossing that junction needs the units packed to one level. These bars nearly always land at the open end of a knocked-through kitchen and dining room, which means the piece is read from both sides and both sides get the same edge treatment rather than one being left as a cut face. The back of a freestanding bar is finished like the front. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. The knee space is measured before the bracket is specified.

The van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. 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. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. 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. Fitting a bar top is slower than carrying one.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. 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. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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 in constant use is a maintenance decision as well. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. One detail across several rooms keeps the fixings the same.

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. A breakfast counter and a trade bar are not the same brief. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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. Where the wall is bowed the rear rail takes it up. Confirm the finished height you want and whether the bar is seen from both sides, and tell us who is building the frame and when it will be complete. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. 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 fixture is drawn for the long run, not the current tenant.

Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. 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. A bar top is heavier than it looks because the apron is solid.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. 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 raised tier is a second piece, priced and drawn as one.

A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Ceilings are lath and plaster at the front and plasterboard in the extension, and the join between the two marks where the original back wall stood. None of that stops a bar being fitted level, but it does mean the top is set to a datum of its own and packed off the frame rather than followed down to the floor. Support under the overhang comes first on the drawing.

Money does not move until the template is done. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. The consumer unit and the meter often sit high on the wall at one end of the kitchen, and neither of them is going to move to suit a run of stone. What carries a bar top here is rarely a kitchen carcass, so the framing underneath gets looked at before anything is measured across the top of it. A bar top is judged from a stool, not from the doorway.