Stone bar tops in Longbridge

Yes. Longbridge is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are IG11. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. A permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole 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. The stone comes off last because it goes down last. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Ceilings are high in these, so wall unit heights and splashback heights are open choices rather than things the room has already decided. 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. The apron is bonded on the bench, never built up in the room. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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. Leaning is a sideways load and framing has to answer for it.

A carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. 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. Where the way in is awkward the bar is drawn in tiers. Where the household has used up the visitor permits it gets for the year, the remaining options are a suspension or a paid bay and both belong on the quote. 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. A short unload is still a long fit on a bar.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop installation. 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. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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. 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. What gets leaned on gets specified for leaning.

The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. 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 is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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. Nothing under the nose is allowed to be in the way. 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. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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. The back of a bar is seen, so the back is finished.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Gas, waste and later wiring were boxed in against the wall long after the house was built, and that boxing is what the run has to clear. 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. What the frame does under the stone is half the job.

A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. 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. Knee room is measured from the frame, not from the nose.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. 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. The seating side decides the piece; the wall side never does.