Stone bar tops in Hampstead

Yes. Hampstead is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW3. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. 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. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. A bar in a house of this age is usually either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the cellar is the harder of the two because the headroom fixes the counter height before anybody else gets a say. The frame is built to the room and the stone answers to the frame. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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.

A communal flight is out of use while a piece is on it, so the carry is timed so nobody is trying to pass on a half-landing. 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 trade bar is carried in outside trading hours or not at all. 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. 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 claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop design & quotation 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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. One detail across several rooms keeps the fixings the same. 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. 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 evening use is what the piece is sized for.

A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. 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. What the shape gives in length it takes back in support. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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. A bar pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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 alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. A fitted stair carpet is either lifted or covered, because grit trodden into it under work boots does more harm than the carry itself. A top with a bonded apron on the front arrives deeper than a worktop and behaves like a beam, so there is no easing it round a turn at all. The drip tray and the bar sink arrive with the top, not after it.

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. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. The seating side is the part that decides the piece, because a stool at the open end puts a load on a corner that a wall would otherwise have been carrying. The nose line is drawn first and everything works back from it.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. 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 the bay is timed, the support goes in first.

Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Rooms are tall with deep window reveals, and a run finishing into a reveal is templated to it rather than assumed square. The floor is suspended timber, so the frame is fixed back to a wall as well as bearing down on the boards, or the whole thing shifts when somebody leans on the nose. A cellar bar is set to the headroom first.