Stone bar tops in Highbury

Yes. Highbury is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N5. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. Controlled hours that end in the middle of the afternoon make the second half of the day easy and put the whole problem in the first half. 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. Bar tops are set once, so the day is planned to allow it. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The addition is a brick narrower than the house it hangs off, which leaves a stub of the original rear wall standing square to the run at the doorway end. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. A breakfast counter on an end is still an overhang problem. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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 top is set to one datum along its own length.

A fitted stair carpet is either lifted or covered, because grit trodden into it under work boots does more harm than the carry itself. 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. 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. 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. Where the bay is timed, the support goes in first.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop installation. 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. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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. Repeated bars get one drawing and one steel schedule. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. 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. Sintered stone earns its keep where the cleaning is harsh.

A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. 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. Support follows the seating plan along the whole nose. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. The frame is made true before the stone is measured. 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. Consent for a structural fixing comes before the fitting date.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. 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. An overhang on two sides is two separate calculations.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. 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. 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. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. A counter fixed back to lightweight framing takes a sideways push as well as a downward load, and framing built for neither gets noggins let into it first. A column in the middle of a bar is a decision, not a surprise.

Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Lath and plaster, a settled floor and a hall with a turn in it are the three things that decide how this job runs. 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. The underside of the nose is polished because it is looked at.