Stone bar tops in Tollington

Yes. Tollington is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N4, N7. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. Estate roads inside a controlled zone are sometimes managed privately rather than by the council, which changes who has to be asked. 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. Where parking is tight the hardware walks in ahead of the stone. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The kitchen occupies the ground floor of the addition with a garden door at the far end, so there is a second way in that is narrower than the front door and a great deal shorter. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Wide doors make piece length a choice rather than a limit. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. Noggins go into a stud wall before a bar is fixed to it.

Whether the kitchen sits straight ahead or off a turn at the end of the hall changes the maximum piece far more than the hall width does. 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. Cellar bars go down a flight, which is the harder direction. A controlled parking zone means either a visitor permit sorted in advance or a suspended bay, and a suspension is applied for days ahead rather than on the morning. 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. A bar top left on a pavement is a bar top with a chipped nose.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. A licensed shared house has fire-door and escape-route rules that decide how and when stone can be carried through the common parts. 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. An overhang on a plan is not an overhang with steel under it. Four kitchens ordered together take one template visit and one delivery, and that is where the saving comes from rather than from a discount on the stone. Harder use and stronger cleaning products push the answer towards porcelain or sintered stone, because a resin-bound surface is the one that shows what has been left standing on it. A bar goes in last, so it is measured last.

The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. 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 flush bar is one plane and twice the overhang problem. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. 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. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. 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.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. 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. Knee room is measured from the frame, not from the nose.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. The chimney breast has almost always been taken out of the kitchen with the stack left standing above it, so that bay of wall is newer plasterwork on a different plane. In a cellar the headroom fixes the counter height first and everything else works back from it, and the stair down is the tightest part of the route because stone carried downward is harder to control than stone carried up. Noggins first, brackets second, stone last.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. Anything that puts a notch in a bar takes material out of the piece at the point people lean on it, so the notch and the support are drawn together or not at all. What the bar wraps around is templated, never assumed square.

Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. 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. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. The rear wall of the addition carries both the back door and the window, which leaves very little unbroken wall for a run to sit against. 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.