Stone bar tops in West Hendon

Yes. West Hendon is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW9. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. 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. The frame is checked before anything comes off the van. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Floor-to-ceiling glazing lights the worktop from one side all day, which shows every ripple in a polished surface and every gap at a scribe. 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. A bar in a small room is drawn for the stools it will take. An unsupported overhang off a stud wall wants noggins fixed between the studs before the boarding goes on, and once it is boarded and skimmed that option has gone. 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. Nothing under the nose is allowed to be in the way.

Whether the stone can stand on end in the car is the first question, because a lift that takes 2.1m upright takes nothing like that lying flat. 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. A bonded apron makes the piece deeper than the doorway expects. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. 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 red route buys minutes and a bar top needs hours.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. One detail across several rooms keeps the fixings the same. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. The evening use is what the piece is sized for.

Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. 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. Stools need floor as well as knee room, and both are drawn. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Stud centres are almost never where the brackets would like to be, so fixing positions get set from the framing and the stone is designed to suit. 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. The back of a bar is seen, so the back is finished. Send the peninsula dimensions including how far the top is meant to project, the stool count, and the internal dimensions of the service lift. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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 fixture is drawn for the long run, not the current tenant.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Plasterboard partitions mean light scribes and clean joins, and the fabrication effort moves to the visible faces instead. 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. The underside of the nose is polished because it is looked at.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Open-plan living makes the kitchen furniture rather than utility, so the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab. 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. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not.

A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Goods lifts and passenger lifts fail differently: one has a rated load that matters, the other has a door aperture that matters more. A top with a bonded apron on the front arrives deeper than a worktop and behaves like a beam, so there is no easing it round a turn at all. The frame is built in the room; only the top has to travel.

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. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. 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. The bar length answers to the seats, not to the wall behind it.