Stone bar tops in Plumstead

Yes. Plumstead is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE18. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. 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. The frame is checked before anything comes off the van. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The flat below hears the floor more than the walls, so lifting boards to move a waste run is a conversation with a neighbour before it is a morning of work. 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. Wide doors make piece length a choice rather than a limit. 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. 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.

Where the hall runs straight through to the back the piece can be walked in flat, and it is only the two door frames that have to be cleared. 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. The nose is the corner that gets caught, so it travels padded. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. 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 red route buys minutes and a bar top needs hours.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop fabrication. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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. Drinks left standing decide the material more than looks do. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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 the piece most likely to be added after the kitchen.

An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. 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. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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 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. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. 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. Fixings into structure are agreed before they are drilled.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Chimney breasts are often taken out at ground level and left standing above, so the middle of the run is newer wall than the two ends of it. 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.

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. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the 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. A bar on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. 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. Nothing sits over a join that somebody leans on.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Turning a heavy piece on edge indoors needs floor space at both ends of the turn, so the hall is cleared of furniture before anything comes off the van. 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. Steel for the overhang is carried in and fixed before the stone.