Stone bar tops in Northwick Park

Yes. Northwick Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA1, HA3. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Harrow. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. 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. What comes off the van first is whatever holds the top up. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

These blocks were built with a lift from new, which will usually take a worktop and almost never takes a full-length island piece. A bar in one of these flats is generally furniture in a reception room rather than part of a kitchen, so it is drawn alongside the skirting and the cornice and built as joinery with the stone as its final element. Noggins first, brackets second, stone last. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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 the bar wraps around is templated, never assumed square.

A fitted stair carpet is either lifted or covered, because grit trodden into it under work boots does more harm than the carry itself. 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. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. 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 templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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. What was drawn and what was built are compared at template.

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. 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. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. 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. The support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out. Confirm the working hours the block allows and the lift booking, and send the frame drawing with the finished height and the projection marked on it. The person choosing the surface is not the person who will cook on it, which argues for a finish that absorbs ordinary wear rather than one that rewards careful housekeeping. 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 front edge takes the wear, whoever is leaning on it.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. 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. Clear length between the returns sets the stool count.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Stone goes up on edge, and it is the half-landing turn rather than the flight itself that sets the maximum piece. 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. Where the way in is awkward the bar is drawn in tiers.

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. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. 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 top will not correct a frame that is out of true.

Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. 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. Old plaster built up over decades makes the scribing heavy, and that time has to be in the plan rather than found on the day. 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. Support under the overhang comes first on the drawing.