Stone bar tops in Harold Wood

Yes. Harold Wood 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. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. 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. Fitting a bar top is slower than carrying one. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The outside walls are cavity and the party wall is solid brick, so fixings behave differently on the two long walls of the same room. 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 frame is built to the room and the stone answers to the frame. 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. 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. A bar pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard.

Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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. Where the way in is awkward the bar is drawn in tiers. On a drive that only takes one vehicle nose-in, the van has to reverse the whole length of it to get back out, which decides which way it goes in. 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. The frame is checked before anything comes off the van.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation 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. 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. The evening use is what the piece is sized for. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage.

A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. 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 material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. Every obstruction under the top is a seating decision too. 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. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. 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.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. 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 frame goes up first so the top has somewhere to land.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. The extension is commonly a flat-roofed addition of the seventies or eighties with a shallower floor build-up, so the two halves of the room do not sit at one level. The side passage is usually wide enough for a full length to reach the room, so piece length is decided by the slab and by what the frame will carry rather than by the front door. A cellar bar is set to the headroom first.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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. The riser is boxed to a line the stone can follow.

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. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The window over the sink sits at about worktop height, so the run is set out around the sill and the reveal rather than under them. 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. A bar top is judged from a stool, not from the doorway.