Stone bar tops in South Hackney

Yes. South Hackney is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E9. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. 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. Packaging and offcuts go back the way the top came in. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Kitchens in these flats are frequently in what was a bedroom or a return room, so the window is tall and its sill sits close to worktop height. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Two tiers where a single piece will not reach. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. Leaning is a sideways load and framing has to answer for it.

A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. 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. The nose is the corner that gets caught, so it travels padded. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. 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. One van, one bar, one visit.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. Repeat detail, single survey, matched batch. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. The brief changes, but the nose still has to be carried.

Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. 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 breakfast counter and a trade bar are not the same brief. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. 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. Nothing under the nose is allowed to be in the way. 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 leaseholder paying for their own kitchen inside managed stock still needs the freeholder to consent, and that consent is about the building and the common parts rather than about the worktop. 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. Seating height is set to a person or to a standard, and stated.

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. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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 back of a bar is seen, so the back is finished.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. 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 raised tier is a second piece, priced and drawn as one.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. 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.

Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. A top with a bonded apron on the front arrives deeper than a worktop and behaves like a beam, so there is no easing it round a turn at all. Steel for the overhang is carried in and fixed before the stone.