Stone bar tops in Hackney Central

Yes. Hackney Central is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E8, E9. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. 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. One van, one bar, one visit. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The communal stair is wide and handsome and the flat door at the top of it is a standard leaf, which is where a long piece stops. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. The apron is bonded on the bench, never built up in the room. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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 riser is boxed to a line the stone can follow.

The step and the gap at the car threshold catch a trolley wheel, so the piece comes off the trolley and goes in by hand. 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. Two people to a bar top, four where the nose is deep. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. 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. Where parking is tight the hardware walks in ahead of the stone.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as 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. 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. 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. 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 support detail is agreed with whoever builds the frame.

A peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. 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. Clear length between the returns sets the stool count. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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. 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. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. 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.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. The back addition is frequently a single skin of brick rendered on both faces, which takes a fixing badly and moves with the weather. 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. The front edge takes the wear, so the front edge takes the detail.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. A bar top left on a pavement is a bar top with a chipped nose.

What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. A bar top is set to one datum along its own length.

Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. Peninsula tops are often the longest single piece in the kitchen, so if anything in the layout is going to force a second slab it is generally this one. 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 bar on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take.