Stone bar tops in Northumberland Heath

Yes. Northumberland Heath is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA8. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. 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. What comes off the van first is whatever holds the top up. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

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. 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. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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. A sloping floor is a problem for the stools, not the top.

A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. 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. Steel for the overhang is carried in and fixed before the stone. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. 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 van stands for the frame as well as the top.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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 was drawn and what was built are compared at template.

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. Two heights means two edge profiles and a spine between them. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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 the bar wraps around is templated, never assumed square. 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. Residents are given written notice before anyone attends, and that notice period rather than the workshop is what governs the earliest sensible start. 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 specification answers to the use, not to the brochure.

The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. A bonded apron makes the piece deeper than the doorway expects.

Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. 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. 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. A garage floor slopes and the frame takes that up.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. 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. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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 support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out.

Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. 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. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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. A bar top will not correct a frame that is out of true.