Stone bar tops in Lessness Heath

Yes. Lessness Heath is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA17. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. 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. Where the bay is timed, the support goes in first. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The windows were steel to begin with and have been swapped for plastic in openings lined out to suit, so the reveal is now deeper than the brickwork behind it. These bars nearly always land at the open end of a knocked-through kitchen and dining room, which means the piece is read from both sides and both sides get the same edge treatment rather than one being left as a cut face. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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.

Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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. The corbels go in before the top does, and both use the same door. 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. The stone comes off last because it goes down last.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. Repeated bars get one drawing and one steel schedule. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. Sintered stone earns its keep where the cleaning is harsh.

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. 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 bar is set out from the seat and worked back to the units. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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. Confirm the finished height you want and whether the bar is seen from both sides, and tell us who is building the frame and when it will be complete. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. 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.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. The kitchen door opens inwards into the middle of a run, so the usable length of that wall stops well short of the corner. 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 bar is set level to itself and packed off the frame.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Corner sinks and corner hobs sit exactly where the joint wants to be, so on an L the cut-out positions get settled before the join positions do. 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 foot rail is planned with the frame, not bolted on later.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. A top with a bonded apron on the front arrives deeper than a worktop and behaves like a beam, so there is no easing it round a turn at all. A bar top will not be flexed round a turn, however light it looks.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. One leg of an L is nearly always the working run and the other little more than a landing space, but both are templated, cut and edged to the same standard. A separate bar in the same room still takes its services from the same run, so the waste, the socket and the water are set out with the kitchen even though the joinery is not. What the shape gives in length it takes back in support.