Stone bar tops in Rotherhithe

Yes. Rotherhithe is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE16. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. Fitting a bar top is slower than carrying one. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A small room puts the sink, hob and tap cut-outs close together on one short length, and the bridge of stone left between them decides whether it can be cut in one piece. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. A garage floor slopes and the frame takes that up. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. 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 stone is cut to the obstruction as found.

A tiled hall floor takes a dropped corner badly, so boards go down over the tiles before anything comes through the door. 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 bar top is the last piece in and the first one people touch. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. 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. The frame is checked before anything comes off the van.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop installation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. Nothing is assumed about a frame somebody else built. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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 overhang is checked against the frame that exists.

A peninsula is an island with one end tied to a run, which means the join between them has to be planned rather than allowed to happen. 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. An overhang on two sides is two separate calculations. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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. What carries the overhang is fixed to structure, not to lining. 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. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. 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. A bar in constant hands wants a finish that does not mark.

An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. 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. Piece length is capped by the turn, then the support is drawn to suit.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. There is no back addition on these, so the kitchen is the original rear room and the run is one wall long with a door at each end of it. 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. Deep skirtings push the frame forward and the top covers it.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. A hundred and forty years of alterations sit under the current kitchen, and the worktop is what has to sit flat on top of all 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. People push against the front edge, so the front edge gets the steel.

A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. A pendant light hanging in the middle of a hall ceiling sets the angle a piece can be tilted to, and it is the measurement nobody thinks to take. 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. Two people to a bar top, four where the nose is deep.