Stone bar tops in Hackney Downs

Yes. Hackney Downs is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E5, E8. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. Where a loading concession applies at all, it holds only while something is being carried, which makes it a way to unload rather than a way to park. 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. A suspension is booked for the fitting day, not the delivery hour. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The flat below hears the floor more than the walls, so lifting boards to move a waste run is a conversation with a neighbour before it is a morning of work. 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. 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. 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.

Carrying down a flight is not the easier direction, because the weight runs ahead of the crew and whoever is at the bottom has no way of stopping a slip. 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. A trade bar is carried in outside trading hours or not at all. Loading concessions differ from one zone to the next rather than following a single national rule, so what applied on the last job proves nothing about this one. 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. Bar tops are set once, so the day is planned to allow it.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. 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. 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. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. 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.

The free end is what needs deciding early: square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall to the floor, and a waterfall is cut in sequence off the same part of the slab. 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 bar on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. 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. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. 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.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. Peninsulas frequently land on a lightweight partition or on units that were never fixed down, and stone needs proper support under it before it goes on. 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. Nothing sits over a join that somebody leans on.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. A short run of external steps before the communal door means a piece is lifted twice before the staircase proper has even started. 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.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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.

Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Electrics went in at conversion, some in surface trunking and some chased into lath and plaster, so no cable route in these rooms is safe to assume. 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. Piece length is capped by the way in and the support follows.