Stone bar tops in Newington Green

Yes. Newington Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N16, N1. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. A suspension is charged by the bay and by the day, so the number of metres asked for is worth getting right the first time. 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.

Boxed sash frames swallow a hundred millimetres of wall on each side of the opening, so the wall between a window and a corner is shorter than a plan makes it look. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. A breakfast counter on an end is still an overhang problem. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. What carries the overhang is fixed to structure, not to lining.

Open-tread and cantilevered stairs give nothing to lean a piece against, so the whole weight stays on the crew for the full length of the flight. 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. A bar top is heavier than it looks because the apron is solid. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. 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 especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop installation. 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. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. 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. Batch work still gets its own template per room. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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. A serving counter and a bar are one piece under two loads.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. 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. What the shape gives in length it takes back in support. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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 corbel never lands where a knee goes. 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. The person leaning on it is the person it was drawn for.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. A picture rail, a deep skirting and a moulded architrave all sit in the way of anything that assumes flat wall from floor to ceiling. 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. The seating side is the side the piece is drawn from.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. The seating side is the part that decides the piece, because a stool at the open end puts a load on a corner that a wall would otherwise have been carrying. The nose line is drawn first and everything works back from it.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The rear wall of the addition carries both the back door and the window, which leaves very little unbroken wall for a run to sit against. 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. A bar top is fitted last and touched first.

Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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 bar is packed level off the frame, not off the floor.