Stone bar tops in Woolwich Dockyard

Yes. Woolwich Dockyard is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE18. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before 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 licensed room sets the hours and the parking has to agree. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

That rear wall carries the back door and the only window, which leaves very little uninterrupted length for a sink run. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Two tiers where a single piece will not reach. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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. The frame is made true before the stone is measured.

The measurement that decides everything is the diagonal between the underside of the flight above and the outer edge of the turn below it. 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 parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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. Nothing is rushed off a tail lift onto an unsupported nose.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop fabrication. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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 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. 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.

Handles on opposing runs meet in the middle of the aisle, so a deep edge profile specified on both sides takes width out of the standing space twice over. 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.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join. 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. Method statements, insurance certificates and named operatives are wanted before a crew is cleared to attend, all of which is routine when it is asked for a week out. 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. Porcelain forgives the cleaning products a bar actually meets.

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. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Older houses put the boiler or the meter on one of the two walls, and whatever is boxed in around it sets the point where that run has to stop. 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. A deep apron takes knee room away quietly.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Many have had the ground floor chimney breast removed to gain three hundred millimetres, and the gained strip is newer blockwork standing proud of the old plaster. 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. Scribed at the back and free at the front.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. 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. Support follows the seating plan along the whole nose.

Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. 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. The support has to be specified to whoever is building the frame before it is boarded up, since steel let in afterwards means taking the front of the bar apart again. A bar is templated after the joinery has stopped moving.