Stone bar tops in Shirley

Yes. Shirley is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. 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. The bar top waits on the van until the frame is level. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

The kitchen sits at the back with a door to the garden and a window over the sink, and both are on the wall the run wants. These bars nearly always land at the open end of a knocked-through kitchen and dining room, which means the piece is read from both sides and both sides get the same edge treatment rather than one being left as a cut face. A trade bar and a home bar are different pieces of work. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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.

Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. 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 the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. 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. A licensed room sets the hours and the parking has to agree.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop templating. 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. 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. 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. Frames get opened up again when the support was left out. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. Repeat detail, single survey, matched batch.

Three stools along one side need more clear length than most plans allow, and once the seating depth is fixed the piece either grows or it loses a seat. 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. Two heights means two edge profiles and a spine between them. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. Confirm the finished height you want and whether the bar is seen from both sides, and tell us who is building the frame and when it will be complete. A quartz sample left on the counter for a week under the actual kitchen lights settles more arguments than any showroom, and an owner is the only person in a position to do that. 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 quote for a bar names who is providing the frame.

Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. 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. Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. 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.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. 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 bar on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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 behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. The floor is a solid slab with a screed over it, which is stable underfoot and rarely flat across a long run. The side passage means a full length can generally reach the room whole, so the break count answers to the slab and to the frame rather than to the front door. The back of a freestanding bar is finished like the front.