Stone bar tops in New Cross Gate

Yes. New Cross Gate is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE14. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. 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. 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.

A maisonette puts the kitchen on one of two levels, so an internal staircase may be part of the route as well as the communal one. Rooms in this stock are compact, so a bar usually replaces a table rather than sitting alongside one, and it is drawn for two or three stools with enough floor left to get past them. Piece length is capped by the way in and the support follows. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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. Noggins go into a stud wall before a bar is fixed to it.

Where the lift will not take the longest run we design a join in rather than gamble, because a piece that will not go up has to go back on the van. 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. Stools and back shelving come in after the stone is down. 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. 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 fabrication 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. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. 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. The evening use is what the piece is sized for. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage.

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. The seating side decides the piece; the wall side never does. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. A sloping floor is a problem for the stools, not the top. 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. 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. 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. The person leaning on it is the person it was drawn for.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. No payment is due before the template. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. A cylinder cupboard or a drying cupboard opens off the kitchen, taking a corner out of the run and giving nothing back. 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. Everything under the nose is agreed before a slab is chosen.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. Fitting a bar top is slower than carrying one.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. Whether the stone can stand on end in the car is the first question, because a lift that takes 2.1m upright takes nothing like that lying flat. 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.

A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Goods lifts and passenger lifts fail differently: one has a rated load that matters, the other has a door aperture that matters more. 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. Where the way in is awkward the bar is drawn in tiers.