Stone bar tops in Highams Park

Yes. Highams Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E4. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Waltham Forest. Where the van cannot turn on the plot it has to arrive already facing the right way, so the approach along the street is part of the plan. 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. The frame is checked before anything comes off the van. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A serving hatch through to the dining room was standard, and where it has been blocked up the patch sits on a different plane to the wall either side of it. 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. A bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. 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.

A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. 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. Suction pads go on the polished face, never on the nose. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. 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 red route buys minutes and a bar top needs hours.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop design & quotation and worktop templating. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. What was drawn and what was built are compared at template.

The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. 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. The nose line is drawn first and everything works back from it. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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. 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. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. 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. Sealing a bar top is a yearly job and we say so.

If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. A bar is templated after the joinery has stopped moving.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. 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 radius on a walked-past corner is agreed at drawing stage.

Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. The larder had a cold shelf and an air brick straight through to the outside, and that brick is usually still open behind whatever now stands in front of it. A bar here usually appears at the open end of a knocked-through kitchen and dining room, where it is read from both sides and both sides have to be finished to the same standard. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. A separate bar in the same room still takes its services from the same run, so the waste, the socket and the water are set out with the kitchen even though the joinery is not. One level or two, and it is decided early.