Stone bar tops in Hyde Park Estate

Yes. Hyde Park Estate is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W2. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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. 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.

A basement kitchen has a flagged or concrete floor laid straight onto the ground, so it is solid, cold and rarely within ten millimetres of level. 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 bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take. 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. 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 frame is made true before the stone is measured.

Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. 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. Cellar bars go down a flight, which is the harder direction. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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. 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 replacement, worktop templating 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. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. A bar is templated after the joinery has stopped moving. 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. 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. The support detail is agreed with whoever builds the frame.

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. 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 stool positions go on the drawing before the join does. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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. Stools change; the nose does not.

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. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. A column in the middle of a bar is a decision, not a surprise.

Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The carcasses stay put. Only the surface changes. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. The stone comes off last because it goes down last.

Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. 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.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The rear wall of the addition carries both the back door and the window, which leaves very little unbroken wall for a run to sit against. 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.