Stone bar tops in White Hart Lane

Yes. White Hart Lane is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N17. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Haringey. Where an event closes the road entirely, the van cannot be moved once it is in, which is a different problem from not being able to park at all. 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. What comes off the van first is whatever holds the top up. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A small room puts the sink, hob and tap cut-outs close together on one short length, and the bridge of stone left between them decides whether it can be cut in one piece. 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 riser gets notched around, not built away from. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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. What the bar wraps around is templated, never assumed square.

A hall that widens further in is still only as good as its tightest point, and that point is usually within a metre of the front door. 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. Where the route is tight the bar gains a join behind a corbel. A market day closes the street to traffic for the morning and hands it back in the afternoon, which moves the visit rather than cancelling it. 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. The van stands for the frame as well as the top.

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. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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.

Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. 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. The bar length answers to the seats, not to the wall behind it. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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 support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out. 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. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. There is no back addition on these, so the kitchen is the original rear room and the run is one wall long with a door at each end of it. 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. Two tiers where a single piece will not reach.

Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Nothing is payable in advance of the template. There is usually a step down into the back addition, so the kitchen floor and the hall floor are not the same level and neither of them is flat. 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. Everything under the nose is agreed before a slab is chosen.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. A front path with a gate and a turn or two adds handling before the door is even reached, and every handling movement is another chance to catch a corner. 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 polished front edge is protected from the tail lift to the frame.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. That rear wall carries the back door and the only window, which leaves very little uninterrupted length for a sink run. The floor is suspended timber, so the frame is fixed back to a wall as well as bearing down on the boards, or the whole thing shifts when somebody leans on the nose. Scribed at the back and free at the front.