Stone bar tops in St Mary Cray

Yes. St Mary Cray is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR5. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. 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 a concrete panel with a modest window, so the run under it sits in a shallow reveal with a hard cill. 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. A bar built as furniture is templated as furniture. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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. Where the wall is bowed the rear rail takes it up.

The measurement that decides everything is the diagonal between the underside of the flight above and the outer edge of the turn below it. 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 corbels go in before the top does, and both use the same door. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. 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. 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 splashbacks & upstands 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. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. 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. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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 full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. 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. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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. A bar pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard. 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. Work between tenancies runs against a fixed date rather than a preference, and stone has a lead time that has to fit inside that window with a few days spare. 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 person leaning on it is the person it was drawn for.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. Where the kitchen has been opened into the living room the opening was trimmed with a steel, and a stub of the old wall was left standing at one end. 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.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. 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. Floors are a sand and cement screed over concrete, laid fast and worn since, so they are hard, solid and seldom flat. 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. Corbels are a decision about how the piece looks from a seat.

A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. 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. A bar top is a shape decision with steel attached to it.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Front doors off the deck open into a lobby barely wider than the door itself, and the turn out of it is a right angle. Dense blockwork holds a fixing properly, which is the one thing that makes a wall-supported nose realistic in this stock. What the room will take decides the stool count.