Stone bar tops in St Katharine Docks

Yes. St Katharine Docks is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E1W. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. What comes off the van first is whatever holds the top up. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The external wall is uninsulated in the blocks that have not been refurbished, and the corner it makes with the flank wall runs cold enough to show behind a cupboard. Rooms in this stock are compact, so a bar usually replaces a table rather than sitting alongside one, and it is drawn for two or three stools with enough floor left to get past them. Two tiers where a single piece will not reach. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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. The knee space is measured before the bracket is specified.

Concierge buildings want the goods entrance, a booked lift and proof of insurance, all of which is straightforward when it is asked for a week out. 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. A waterfall end travels as its own piece and is bonded in place. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. The van stands for the frame as well as the top.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. 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. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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. Sintered stone earns its keep where the cleaning is harsh. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. 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. An overhang on a plan is not an overhang with steel under it.

A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. 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. The overhang is drawn before the layout is signed off. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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. Where the wall is bowed the rear rail takes it up. Send a photograph of every corner of the room so we can see the boxings, the length you want, and how many stools you expect to use. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. 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. Porcelain forgives the cleaning products a bar actually meets.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. 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. A good number of these blocks are large panel system builds, where the wall is a precast unit with a grouted joint and nothing gets cut into it. 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. Drinks stand on it for hours, which changes the material answer.

Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Bollards, planters and a one-way service road can turn what looks like a ten-metre carry into a fifty-metre one. 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. Suction pads go on the polished face, never on the nose.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. The barrier, the entry code and the estate rules decide when a van can get near the door, and none of that is negotiable on the day. Where the bar is going into a cellar the pieces travel downward rather than up, and carrying stone down a flight gives a crew less control over it, not more. The route is measured to the deepest part of the piece.

A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. 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 top is a shape decision with steel attached to it.