Stone bar tops in Rayners Lane

Yes. Rayners Lane is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA2, HA5. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Harrow. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Inter-war purpose-built blocks have curved external walls and steel windows, so a run along an outside wall is following a genuine curve rather than a bow. A bar in one of these flats is generally furniture in a reception room rather than part of a kitchen, so it is drawn alongside the skirting and the cornice and built as joinery with the stone as its final element. The riser gets notched around, not built away from. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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 notch in a bar top is drawn with its support beside it.

Concierge buildings want the goods entrance, a booked lift and proof of insurance, all of which is straightforward when it is asked for a week out. 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. Piece length is capped by the turn, then the support is drawn to suit. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. 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 especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. 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. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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. A bar is templated after the joinery has stopped moving. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. 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. The support detail is agreed with whoever builds the frame.

Handles on opposing runs meet in the middle of the aisle, so a deep edge profile specified on both sides takes width out of the standing space twice over. 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. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

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. 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. Leaning is a sideways load and framing has to answer for it. Confirm the working hours the block allows and the lift booking, and send the frame drawing with the finished height and the projection marked on it. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. 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. Seating height is set to a person or to a standard, and stated.

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. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. This is a logistics job before it is a stone job, and the lift car is usually the single biggest constraint on the design. None of that stops a bar being fitted level, but it does mean the top is set to a datum of its own and packed off the frame rather than followed down to the floor. A bar top is judged from a stool, not from the doorway.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Older houses put the boiler or the meter on one of the two walls, and whatever is boxed in around it sets the point where that run has to stop. 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. A bar on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take.

Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. 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.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Thick external walls, deep window reveals and boxed risers mean the runs are templated to what is there rather than to a rectangle. What carries a bar top here is rarely a kitchen carcass, so the framing underneath gets looked at before anything is measured across the top of it. What holds the front edge up matters more than what the slab cost.