Stone bar tops in South Bank

Yes. South Bank is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE1. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. 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. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Houses on modern estates are built to a handful of standard plans, so the kitchen is square, predictable and modest in area. What gets called a bar in a flat like this is usually the end of a peninsula with stools pushed under it, and the overhang was drawn long before anyone worked out what carries it. The break sits over support and clear of every seat. A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. 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. What carries the overhang is fixed to structure, not to lining.

Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. 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. Nothing about a front edge survives being dragged. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. 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, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, 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. Upgrading a builder-finish kitchen is mostly a swap, so the cost sits in the material choice rather than in the shape of the room. 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. Batch work still gets its own template per room. Handover-spec kitchens are square, plumb and predictable, which means the join count is honest and driven by run length rather than by the building. 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. A serving counter and a bar are one piece under two loads.

Knee room under a breakfast bar is measured from the face of the cabinets rather than from the edge of the stone, so a deep apron quietly eats the depth somebody actually gets to sit in. 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 material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Dot-and-dab plasterboard sounds solid and is hollow behind, so anything fixed through it has to hit a dab or a batten rather than a void. 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. A corbel never lands where a knee goes. Send the peninsula dimensions including how far the top is meant to project, the stool count, and the internal dimensions of the service lift. 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. 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. The support is specified for the next occupant as well.

The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. 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. Nothing is rushed off a tail lift onto an unsupported nose.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Timber-frame construction with plasterboard linings means every fixing has to find a stud, and a peninsula end needs proper support built in beforehand. 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. A breakfast counter on an end is still an overhang problem.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The lift car, the loading bay and the building manager decide the piece sizes here, not the slab. 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. A home bar is joinery first and stone second.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. 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. 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. A bar on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take.