Stone bar tops in Squirrels Heath

Yes. Squirrels Heath is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM2, RM11. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. 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. 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 licensed room sets the hours and the parking has to agree. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

The incoming main and the stopcock come up through the floor at the old scullery wall, so whatever unit stands over them has to stay removable. The side passage is usually wide enough for a full length to reach the room, so piece length is decided by the slab and by what the frame will carry rather than by the front door. A cellar bar is set to the headroom first. 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. 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. Nothing under the nose is allowed to be in the way.

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. 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. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. 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. Nothing is rushed off a tail lift onto an unsupported nose.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop replacement. 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. 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. 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. The brief changes, but the nose still has to be carried. 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. 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. Where the use is hard, the surface is chosen for it.

A U shape uses more linear metres than people expect, and the two returns rarely nest together, so a second slab is a genuine possibility. 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. Stools need floor as well as knee room, and both are drawn. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

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. 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. The back of a bar is seen, so the back is finished. 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. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. Where the person choosing it is not the person who will lean on it, the seating height is set to a standard rather than to whoever happens to be standing in the room. The person leaning on it is the person it was drawn for.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. 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. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. 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. Two trips to the van, one for hardware and one for stone.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The old larder leaves behind a thick cold shelf and a vent brick through the outer wall, and both have to go before that wall reads flat. 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. Corbels are a decision about how the piece looks from a seat.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. Where the side return has been filled in, one side of the new room is old brick and the other is new blockwork, and the two do not behave alike. 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. A home bar is joinery first and stone second.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. With three walls in play the chance of one of them being out of square is high, and the template has to carry all three angles. 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. The bar length answers to the seats, not to the wall behind it.