Stone bar tops in Pratts Bottom

Yes. Pratts Bottom is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR6. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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 van stands for the frame as well as the top. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Ceiling beams cross the room at a height that decides where a piece can be stood on edge and where it cannot. There is normally room here for a genuine bar rather than a seating overhang, which means a rear counter, a small sink and a run of shelving all drawn as one piece of joinery. A garage floor slopes and the frame takes that up. 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. The riser is boxed to a line the stone can follow.

Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. 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 bonded apron makes the piece deeper than the doorway expects. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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 bar fit is a day, not a drop.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. 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. 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. Drinks left standing decide the material more than looks do.

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. 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.

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. 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. Steel spans what a carcass cannot. Send the bar layout with the rear counter and any sink marked, the seating side and stool count, and the edge profile you want on the front. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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 specification answers to the use, not to the brochure.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. 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. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. 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. A bar on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. The floor is often flags or brick laid straight on the ground, so it is solid, uneven and not going to be levelled by chasing into it. Bars in these houses run long enough to need a break, so it is placed over support and clear of every stool position before anything is nested. Beer lines and a glasswasher change what goes under the top.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. A loading bay or a red route puts a clock on the unload, so the pieces come off in the order they will be fitted rather than the order they were loaded. 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 frame is built in the room; only the top has to travel.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Where a run finishes hard against a wall the last few millimetres are scribed, and where it finishes in open floor it is cut square and polished, which is two different jobs on one length. A separate bar in the same room still takes its services from the same run, so the waste, the socket and the water are set out with the kitchen even though the joinery is not. Nothing sits over a join that somebody leans on.