Stone bar tops in Highgate

Yes. Highgate is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N6, N19. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The floor is often flags or brick laid straight on the ground, so it is solid, uneven and not going to be levelled by chasing into it. There is normally room here for a genuine bar rather than a seating overhang, which means a rear counter, a small sink and a run of shelving being drawn as one piece of joinery with the stone reading across all of it. A bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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 car will often hold more than its doors will admit, and it is the clear width between the door edges that a piece actually has to pass through. 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. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. 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 really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. What was drawn and what was built are compared at template. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. A bar is templated after the joinery has stopped moving.

An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. 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. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. Steel spans what a carcass cannot. Send the bar layout with the rear counter and any sink marked, the seating side and stool count, and the edge profile you want on the front. A quartz sample left on the counter for a week under the actual kitchen lights settles more arguments than any showroom, and an owner is the only person in a position to do that. 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.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. A curved bay or a canted corner turns up more often here than people expect, and a curve is templated and cut, never bent. 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 seating side is the side the piece is drawn from.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. 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. Packaging and offcuts go back the way the top came in.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. A bar top is set to one datum along its own length.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. 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 radius on a walked-past corner is agreed at drawing stage.