Stone bar tops in St Paul's

Yes. St Paul's is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC4M. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. 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 short unload is still a long fit on a bar. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Dot-and-dab plasterboard bellies at a taped internal angle, so the run picks up a few millimetres over the last 300mm and a plan-angle mitre will not close. What is called a bar in a flat like this is usually the end of a peninsula with stools pushed under it, and the projection was drawn on the layout long before anybody worked out what would carry it. The frame is built to the room and the stone answers to the frame. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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 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. 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. A waterfall end travels as its own piece and is bonded in place. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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. Permits are sorted before a corbel is drilled.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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 run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. 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 alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through 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 the peninsula dimensions including how far the top is meant to project, the stool count, and the internal dimensions of the service lift. A let property is specified for durability and for a fixed window, and both of those are legitimate reasons to choose differently. 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 alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. 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. Suction pads go on the polished face, never on the nose.

If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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. Every obstruction under the top is a seating decision too.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. The kitchen is usually part of the living space, so three edges are read from a sofa rather than from standing height at the sink. 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.

If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Boxed soil stacks and ventilation ducts run behind the units, and the boxing depth changes between floor level and worktop height. The carcasses are thin cam-lock boxes that will not take a leaning load on their own, so flat steel is let into them flush with the top of the frame before any stone goes on, rather than corbels being screwed to the front afterwards. A cellar bar is set to the headroom first.