Stone bar tops in Middle Park

Yes. Middle Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE9. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

Whole streets went up to two or three plans, so the house next door has the same kitchen and forty years of extensions have made none of them measure the same. The one advantage here is the fabric: dense blockwork holds a fixing properly, which makes a wall-carried front edge realistic where a stud partition would not allow it at all. A long counter is a beam before it is a surface. 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. 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.

Pendant fittings over the stairwell and anything hung on the half-landing come down first, because a piece on edge sweeps a wider arc than the people carrying it. 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 route is measured to the deepest part of the piece. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. A short unload is still a long fit on a bar.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop fabrication. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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 in constant use is a maintenance decision as well. 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. 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. One detail across several rooms keeps the fixings the same.

A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. 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. Knee room is measured from the frame, not from the nose. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

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. 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 a photograph of every corner of the room so we can see the boxings, the length you want, and how many stools you expect to use. 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. 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. Nothing structural is drilled on an assumption.

Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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 stone is cut to the obstruction as found.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Ceilings sit at about two point three metres and the head of the window is close under them, so a unit over the window has very little wall to hold onto. Space is tight, so a bar here tends to replace a table rather than sit alongside one, and the piece is drawn for two or three stools rather than a row of them. The apron is bonded on the bench, never built up in the room.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. 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. A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. 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. The seating side decides the piece; the wall side never does.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. The gas enters at the back of the house and the pipe to the hob crosses the room at low level in a boxing along the skirting. A boxed riser or a soil stack in the corner usually decides which wall the counter can go against, and the top is notched round it rather than stopped short of it. Piece length is capped by the way in and the support follows.