Stone bar tops in Liverpool Street

Yes. Liverpool Street is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC2M. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. 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. Trestles outside beat balancing a top on a half-built frame. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

The lift is a small passenger car with a gate, and the alternative is a stone stair winding round the shaft with a turn at every half-landing. A bar in one of these flats is generally furniture in a reception room rather than part of a kitchen, so it is drawn alongside the skirting and the cornice and built as joinery with the stone as its final element. The frame is built to the room and the stone answers to the frame. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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. Leaning is a sideways load and framing has to answer for it.

A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. 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. The route is measured to the deepest part of the piece. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. 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 offcut from a bar sink leaves in the van.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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 goes in last, so it is measured last. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. What gets leaned on gets specified for leaning.

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. 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. A flush bar is one plane and twice the overhang problem. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. 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. Nothing under the nose is allowed to be in the way. Confirm the working hours the block allows and the lift booking, and send the frame drawing with the finished height and the projection marked on it. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. 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. Repairability at the nose is a fair question to ask early.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. 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. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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 back of a bar is seen, so the back is finished.

Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. 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. Stools and back shelving come in after the stone is down.

If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. These kitchens were service rooms once, so they are long, narrow and further from the entrance than the floor plan suggests. 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. A bar top is fitted last and touched first.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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. Batch work still gets its own template per room.