Stone bar tops in Seven Kings

Yes. Seven Kings is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are IG3. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Redbridge. Camera enforcement gives nobody the chance to explain, where an officer on foot at least sees a tail lift down and stone coming off it. 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 red route buys minutes and a bar top needs hours. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Where the addition is single storey the ceiling follows a lean-to roof, so one side of the room loses height and a full-height panel has a sloping stop. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. The stone is the last element of the joinery, not the first. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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.

Garden routes carry their own hazards: a drain cover, a step up to a patio, wet decking, or a lawn that will not take a loaded trolley. 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 nose is the corner that gets caught, so it travels padded. Where a loading concession applies at all, it holds only while something is being carried, which makes it a way to unload rather than a way to park. 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. Packaging and offcuts go back the way the top came in.

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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. Repeat detail, single survey, matched batch.

Side-return kitchens are long and narrow with one outside wall, and the wall the run sits against is often the oldest, least straight surface in the house. 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. One level or two, and it is decided early. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. Leaning is a sideways load and framing has to answer for it. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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.

Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. Nothing under the nose is allowed to be in the way.

A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. Original quarry tiles survive under a later vinyl in many of these, and lifting the units off them shows how far the floor has fallen towards the garden end. 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. The frame is built to the room and the stone answers to the frame.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. The outrigger shares a party wall with the addition next door for its whole length, so one long side of the kitchen is solid brick with another kitchen on the far side of it. A bar in a house of this age is usually either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the cellar is the harder of the two because the headroom fixes the counter height before anybody else gets a say. A cellar bar is set to the headroom first.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. 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. Steel for the overhang is carried in and fixed before the stone.