Stone bar tops in Roxbourne

Yes. Roxbourne is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA2. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Harrow. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. 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. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The gas enters at the back of the house and the pipe to the hob crosses the room at low level in a boxing along the skirting. Rooms in this stock are compact, so a bar usually replaces a table rather than sitting alongside one, and it is drawn for two or three stools with enough floor left to get past them. Beer lines and a glasswasher change what goes under the top. Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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 bar top will not correct a frame that is out of true.

A side gate hung to open outward against a fence post is narrower in use than it measures, and lifting the gate off its hinges is usually the quickest win on the route. 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 bar top will not be flexed round a turn, however light it looks. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. 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. The bar top waits on the van until the frame is level.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. 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. 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. A bar is the piece most likely to be added after the kitchen. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Frames get opened up again when the support was left out.

Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. 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. A radius on a walked-past corner is agreed at drawing stage. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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. Fixings go into timber that was put there for them. Send a photograph of every corner of the room so we can see the boxings, the length you want, and how many stools you expect to use. Managed stock usually comes with its own rules about working hours, waste, and who is allowed on site. 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 bar outlasts whoever specified it.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. 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. One level or two, and it is decided early.

Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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. The knee space is measured before the bracket is specified.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. 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. An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. 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. A breakfast counter and a trade bar are not the same brief.

The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The ceiling is a concrete soffit with a skim on it, so there is nothing to fix into overhead and no void to hide anything in. 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. Stool height and knee room are settled on the drawing.