Stone bar tops in Little Ilford

Yes. Little Ilford is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E12. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Newham. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. 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. Packaging and offcuts go back the way the top came in. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The under-stair cupboard opens off the kitchen in most of them, and its door swing is the reason a corner run stops where it does. 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. Piece length is capped by the way in and the support follows. 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. 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.

Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. 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. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. 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. One van, one bar, one visit.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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. An overhang on a plan is not an overhang with steel under it. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. 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 goes in last, so it is measured last.

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 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. 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. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join. 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. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. Where the person choosing it is not the person who will lean on it, the seating height is set to a standard rather than to whoever happens to be standing in the room. The front edge takes the wear, whoever is leaning on it.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. The rear extension is usually the newest and truest part of the building, so it is the older half of the kitchen that gives the trouble. 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. Everything under the nose is agreed before a slab is chosen.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. 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 column in the middle of a bar is a decision, not a surprise.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The scullery and the kitchen were knocked into one at some point, and the stub of the old dividing wall is still there under the plaster. 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 top is a structural piece with a polished face on it.

Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. A loading bay or a red route puts a clock on the unload, so the pieces come off in the order they will be fitted rather than the order they were loaded. 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 bar top will not be flexed round a turn, however light it looks.