Stone bar tops in Oakleigh Park

Yes. Oakleigh Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N20. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. The distance from the standing to the actual kitchen door is the number that counts, since plenty of drives finish at a side gate and a garden path. 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. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

The rear wall is usually a single brick thick and has been rendered, patched and re-rendered, so it bows in and out along the length of the run. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. The break sits over support and clear of every seat. Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. 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 bar pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard.

A tiled hall floor takes a dropped corner badly, so boards go down over the tiles before anything comes through the door. 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. The corbels go in before the top does, and both use the same door. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. 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 van stands for the frame as well as the top.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop design & quotation. 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. Batch work still gets its own template per room. 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. 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. A serving counter and a bar are one piece under two loads.

Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. 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. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. 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. Every obstruction under the top is a seating decision too. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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. A bar outlasts whoever specified it.

A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. 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. Clear length between the returns sets the stool count.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. 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. A bar fit is a day, not a drop.

Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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. The riser is boxed to a line the stone can follow.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Every internal doorway on the way through is another frame to clear, and internal doors come off their hinges rather than being propped open. 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 bar top will not be flexed round a turn, however light it looks.