Stone bar tops in Plaistow

Yes. Plaistow is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E13. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Newham. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. 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. A bar fit is a day, not a drop. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These were built late enough to have a damp course and proper footings, so the front of the house is close to true and the rear addition holding the kitchen is the part that has dropped. In a cellar the headroom fixes the counter height first and everything else works back from it, and the stair down is the tightest part of the route because stone carried downward is harder to control than stone carried up. A bar built as furniture is templated as furniture. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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. The bar is packed level off the frame, not off the floor.

A carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. 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 will not be flexed round a turn, however light it looks. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. 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. Steel and corbels are unloaded before the stone is.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. The steel is priced with the bar, not after it. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Drinks left standing decide the material more than looks do.

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. Clear length between the returns sets the stool count. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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 notch in a bar top is drawn with its support beside it. 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. 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. A quote for a bar names who is providing the frame.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. The hall is the only way in and out for whoever lives there, so it is cleared and then kept clear for as long as pieces are moving. 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. The nose is the corner that gets caught, so it travels padded.

Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. The kitchen occupies the ground floor of the addition with a garden door at the far end, so there is a second way in that is narrower than the front door and a great deal shorter. A bar in a house of this age is usually either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the cellar is the harder of the two because the headroom fixes the counter height before anybody else gets a say. What the room will take decides the stool count.

Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. 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. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. Leaning is a sideways load and framing has to answer for it.

Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Where the turn inside is tight the piece gets turned on the path and brought in already on edge, which needs room in front of the door as well as behind it. Where the bar is going into a cellar the pieces travel downward rather than up, and carrying stone down a flight gives a crew less control over it, not more. Steel for the overhang is carried in and fixed before the stone.