Stone bar tops in New Barnet

Yes. New Barnet is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EN5, EN4. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. Controlled hours that end in the middle of the afternoon make the second half of the day easy and put the whole problem in the first half. 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. Permits are sorted before a corbel is drilled. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

The rear extension is frequently original rather than added, which means it is solidly built and just as far out of square as the rest of the house. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Where the walls give nothing, the bar stands on its own. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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. Where the wall is bowed the rear rail takes it up.

A car that answers every floor button pressed while a piece is standing in it needs to be held on the key, and the key usually lives at a desk that wants notice. 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. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. 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 nose stays wrapped until the frame is ready for it.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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.

Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. 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 alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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 bar pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard. 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. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. 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. The person leaning on it is the person it was drawn for.

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. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. There is usually a step down into the back addition, so the kitchen floor and the hall floor are not the same level and neither of them is flat. 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. The seating side is the side the piece is drawn from.

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. 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. Sash windows sit low in the rear wall, and the sill often lands below the height a worktop wants to run past. What carries a bar top here is rarely a kitchen carcass, so the framing underneath gets looked at before anything is measured across the top of it. A bar top is fitted last and touched first.

Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. 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.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a three-metre worktop however it is stood, and there is no trimming it on the landing. Where the bar is going into a cellar the pieces travel downward rather than up, and carrying stone down a flight gives a crew less control over it, not more. A bar top is heavier than it looks because the apron is solid.