Stone bar tops in Harold Hill

Yes. Harold Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM3. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. 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. A suspension is booked for the fitting day, not the delivery hour. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

These were built with generous room sizes for their date, so a peninsula fits where a speculative house of the same age would not take one. Rooms in this stock are compact, so a bar usually replaces a table rather than sitting alongside one, and it is drawn for two or three stools with enough floor left to get past them. A trade bar and a home bar are different pieces of work. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. Steel spans what a carcass cannot.

A Victorian hall arch sits lower than the ceiling either side of it, and it is the point a piece carried on edge meets first. 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. Stools and back shelving come in after the stone is down. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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. Bar tops are set once, so the day is planned to allow it.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. The evening use is what the piece is sized for. 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. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage.

The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. 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 raised tier is a second piece, priced and drawn as one. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the 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. A bar top is set to one datum along its own length. Send a photograph of every corner of the room so we can see the boxings, the length you want, and how many stools you expect to use. Consent for the work sits with the freeholder or the managing body, and getting it in writing first avoids a crew arriving to a locked door. 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. Consent for a structural fixing comes before the fitting date.

An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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. The frame is made true before the stone is measured.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. A meter cupboard set into the hall wall narrows the run at exactly the height a carried piece travels. 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. A bar top is heavier than it looks because the apron is solid.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. 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. The stool positions go on the drawing before the join does.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. 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. A flush bar is one plane and twice the overhang problem.