Stone bar tops in New Addington

Yes. New Addington is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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. Permits are sorted before a corbel is drilled. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Walls look modern and are not: block or breeze with a skim that has been patched over decades, so dry-laying and scribing still apply. A bar in this stock is nearly always a short breakfast counter on the end of a run, and the end is exactly the point where the load lands with the least underneath it. The apron is bonded on the bench, never built up in the room. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. What carries the overhang is fixed to structure, not to lining.

Weight tells on a staircase more than anywhere else, because there is nowhere to set a piece down mid-flight and no way to change your grip once it is moving. 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 is heavier than it looks because the apron is solid. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. The nose stays wrapped until the frame is ready for it.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop templating. 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. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. 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. Batch work still gets its own template per room. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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 serving counter and a bar are one piece under two loads.

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. The seating side decides the piece; the wall side never does. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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 corbel never lands where a knee goes. Tell us what the end of the run is built off, send the length and projection you want, and confirm whether there is rear access into the kitchen. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. 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. Stools change; the nose does not.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Small, roughly square kitchens with a back door and a window in the middle of the run: short lengths, few joins, and a lot to work around. 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. Stool height and knee room are settled on the drawing.

The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. The window sits in the middle of the run over the sink, and its board and cill set the limit on how tall an upstand can be. Partitions are frequently lightweight, so anything fixed back to a wall gets noggins let into the framing before a bracket is offered up to it, and a fixing into plasterboard alone is not an option on a piece people push against. Piece length is capped by the way in and the support follows.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. 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. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. Fitting a bar top is slower than carrying one.

A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. 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. Two heights means two edge profiles and a spine between them.