Stone bar tops in Knight's Hill

Yes. Knight's Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE27. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. Where the drive is shared, the half-hour the van spends in the way is agreed with the neighbour in advance rather than apologised for at the time. 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. Packaging and offcuts go back the way the top came in. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Many were built with a solid sub-floor to the rear rooms, so the kitchen floor is concrete and level while the front of the house is suspended timber. 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. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join.

A handrail that has to come off before a piece will pass is twenty minutes at the start of the day, and it goes back on the wall before we leave. 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 step up from the drive to the threshold turns the last two metres into a lift, and a lift is where two pairs of hands become the minimum. 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. One van, one bar, one visit.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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. Nothing is assumed about a frame somebody else built. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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 overhang is checked against the frame that exists.

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. One level or two, and it is decided early. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

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. 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 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. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. 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.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. 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 breakfast counter and a trade bar are not the same brief.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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 in constant use is a maintenance decision as well.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. The back addition is frequently a single skin of brick rendered on both faces, which takes a fixing badly and moves with the weather. None of that stops a bar being fitted level, but it does mean the top is set to a datum of its own and packed off the frame rather than followed down to the floor. A bar that flexes was supported for weight it never gets.

Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Edwardian terraces are wider and taller than the Victorian houses next to them, so the kitchen usually takes a full-width rear room rather than a narrow outrigger. In a cellar the headroom fixes the counter height first and everything else works back from it, and the stair down is the tightest part of the route because stone carried downward is harder to control than stone carried up. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not.