Stone bar tops in West Dulwich

Yes. West Dulwich is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE21. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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 fit is a day, not a drop. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

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. 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. A bar built as furniture is templated as furniture. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. 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. Leaning is a sideways load and framing has to answer for it.

Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. 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 bonded apron makes the piece deeper than the doorway expects. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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. Steel and corbels are unloaded before the stone is.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. 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. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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 was drawn and what was built are compared at template.

The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. 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. Two heights means two edge profiles and a spine between them. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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. Nothing under the nose is allowed to be in the way. 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. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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. Stools change; the nose does not.

The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. 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. The back of a bar is seen, so the back is finished.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. 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. 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. A home bar is joinery first and stone second.

The carcasses stay put. Only the surface changes. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. Where the clock is running the frame is levelled and the steel is in before the top ever leaves the tail lift. The bar top waits on the van until the frame is level.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. 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. Clear length between the returns sets the stool count.