Stone bar tops in Pentonville

Yes. Pentonville is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N1. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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. A suspension is booked for the fitting day, not the delivery hour. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Original shutter boxes survive in the reveals of the front rooms and stand proud of the plaster, and that is the line a run under the window has to be scribed to. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. What the room will take decides the stool count. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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.

Every internal doorway on the way through is another frame to clear, and internal doors come off their hinges rather than being propped open. 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 will not be flexed round a turn, however light it looks. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. 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. Bar tops are set once, so the day is planned to allow it.

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 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. Shared-house kitchens take heavier use from more people than a family kitchen does, and the surface gets chosen on that basis rather than on looks. 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. What was drawn and what was built are compared at template. Where a single building holds several small kitchens, the work arrives as one job rather than four, and it should be cut off the same slab run so the batches genuinely match. 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 bar is templated after the joinery has stopped moving.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. 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. Clear length between the returns sets the stool count. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. 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. Where a landlord or housing provider is involved there is a specification to meet and a process to follow, and both are settled before a date is offered. 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. Nothing structural is drilled on an assumption.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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 bar is packed level off the frame, not off the floor.

A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Sash windows sit low in the rear wall, and the sill often lands below the height a worktop wants to run past. 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 stone follows the frame, and the frame follows the stools.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. 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. A bar on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Where the kitchen has taken the bay, the end of the room is three facets of glass set at angles and there is no straight wall left to finish against. The floor is suspended timber, so the frame is fixed back to a wall as well as bearing down on the boards, or the whole thing shifts when somebody leans on the nose. Wide doors make piece length a choice rather than a limit.