Stone bar tops in King's Cross

Yes. King's Cross is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N1C, N1, NW1. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Where a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. 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. Two trips to the van, one for hardware and one for stone. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Block and beam floors with blockwork walls are true enough that the scribes are light and the joins can be pulled tight. What is called a bar in a flat like this is usually the end of a peninsula with stools pushed under it, and the projection was drawn on the layout long before anybody worked out what would carry it. Two tiers where a single piece will not reach. 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.

A rated load sounds ample until three lengths of granite and two fitters are standing on it, so the stone goes up one piece at a time. 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. A waterfall end travels as its own piece and is bonded in place. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. 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. Trestles outside beat balancing a top on a half-built frame.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop fabrication and worktop design & quotation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Handover-spec kitchens are square, plumb and predictable, which means the join count is honest and driven by run length rather than by the building. 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. A specification repeated across several plots has to be repeatable, which quietly rules out the natural stones where no two slabs match. 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.

A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. 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. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

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. Send the peninsula dimensions including how far the top is meant to project, the stool count, and the internal dimensions of the service lift. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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 bar is permanent joinery with stone on top of it.

An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. The units below stay exactly as they are; only the surface is replaced. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. The offcut from a bar sink leaves in the van.

If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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 stone is cut to the obstruction as found.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Plasterboard partitions mean light scribes and clean joins, and the fabrication effort moves to the visible faces instead. 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. Leaning weight, not saucepans, is what the piece is sized for.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Where a run finishes hard against a wall the last few millimetres are scribed, and where it finishes in open floor it is cut square and polished, which is two different jobs on one length. 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.