Stone bar tops in Royal Albert Wharf

Yes. Royal Albert Wharf is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E16. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Newham. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. One van, one bar, one visit. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Floor-to-ceiling glazing lights the worktop from one side all day, which shows every ripple in a polished surface and every gap at a scribe. What is called a bar in a flat like this is usually the end of a peninsula with stools pushed under it, and the projection was drawn on the layout long before anybody worked out what would carry it. Two tiers where a single piece will not reach. A partition that gives when you lean on it will give under someone sitting at an overhang, and a bonded mitre nearby is where that movement shows first. 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. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join.

Handrails, mirrors and a sloping ceiling panel all eat into the usable diagonal, and none of them appear on a lift specification sheet. 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 frame goes up first so the top has somewhere to land. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. Where parking is tight the hardware walks in ahead of the stone.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. 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. A bar is the piece most likely to be added after the kitchen. 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. 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. Frames get opened up again when the support was left out.

Peninsula tops are often the longest single piece in the kitchen, so if anything in the layout is going to force a second slab it is generally this one. 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 deep apron takes knee room away quietly. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Where a peninsula returns into a stud wall the load has to sit on the units, with the wall doing no more than steadying it. 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 column in the middle of a bar is a decision, not a surprise. Send the peninsula dimensions including how far the top is meant to project, the stool count, and the internal dimensions of the service lift. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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 chipped front edge can be dressed in place.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Developer carcasses are thin cam-lock chipboard, which is entirely adequate under laminate and wants bracing before stone. 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 overhang decides the bar, and the bar decides the stone.

Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Open-plan living makes the kitchen furniture rather than utility, so the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab. The carcasses are thin cam-lock boxes, so flat steel is let into them before the stone goes on rather than corbels being screwed to the front of them afterwards. Scribed at the back and free at the front.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Everything arrives through one controlled entrance with a booking sheet, and a delivery that misses its slot waits. 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. Drinks stand on it for hours, which changes the material answer.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. Anything that puts a notch in a bar takes material out of the piece at the point people lean on it, so the notch and the support are drawn together or not at all. The stone is cut to the obstruction as found.