Stone bar tops in Upper Holloway

Yes. Upper Holloway is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N19. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. 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 top left on a pavement is a bar top with a chipped nose. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The chimney breast is usually still standing with the opening blocked up, and the alcoves either side of it are rarely the same width as each other. 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 stone is the last element of the joinery, not the first. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. 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. What carries the overhang is fixed to structure, not to lining.

Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. 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. Front tier and back tier are carried and set as two pieces. A suspension is charged by the bay and by the day, so the number of metres asked for is worth getting right the first time. 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.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. Nothing is assumed about a frame somebody else built. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. The overhang is checked against the frame that exists.

Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. 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. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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 corbel never lands where a knee goes. 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. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. 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. A bar in constant hands wants a finish that does not mark.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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. The bar is packed level off the frame, not off the floor.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. A top-floor conversion puts part of the kitchen under the slope of the roof, so the wall behind the run stops at head height along one side of the room. 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. The frame is built to the room and the stone answers to the frame.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. 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. 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. Knee room is measured from the frame, not from the nose.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. 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. The seating side decides the piece; the wall side never does.