Stone bar tops in Temple

Yes. Temple is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC4Y. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. 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. 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 bar fit is a day, not a drop. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Many were built with a solid sub-floor to the rear rooms, so the kitchen floor is concrete and level while the front of the house is suspended timber. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. The break sits over support and clear of every seat. 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. Noggins go into a stud wall before a bar is fixed to it.

Booked delivery windows on a managed estate run to an hour, and a worktop install does not happen inside an hour. 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 route is measured to the deepest part of the piece. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. Steel and corbels are unloaded before the stone is.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. 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. 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. A bar goes in last, so it is measured last. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. 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. What gets leaned on gets specified for leaning.

Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. 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 bar on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take. 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. A sloping floor is a problem for the stools, not the top. 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. 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. The corbel is on show, so it is chosen rather than supplied.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. 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. Party wall settlement pulls the floor down at one side of the room, so a long run reads level at one end and not at the other. 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. What holds the front edge up matters more than what the slab cost.

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. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. 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 bar top waits on the van until the frame is level.

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 are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Gas, waste and later wiring were boxed in against the wall long after the house was built, and that boxing is what the run has to clear. What carries a bar top here is rarely a kitchen carcass, so the framing underneath gets looked at before anything is measured across the top of it. Leaning weight, not saucepans, is what the piece is sized for.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. 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. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. 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. Nothing sits over a join that somebody leans on.