Stone bar tops in Woolwich

Yes. Woolwich 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. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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 red route buys minutes and a bar top needs hours. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The rear extension is frequently original rather than added, which means it is solidly built and just as far out of square as the rest of the house. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Wide doors make piece length a choice rather than a limit. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the 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. The support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out.

A car ceiling at 2.2m sets the tallest thing that will stand in it, and the trap panel and light fitting take a slice off even that. 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. The frame is built in the room; only the top has to travel. 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. 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. Packaging and offcuts go back the way the top came in.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage. 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. What was drawn and what was built are compared at template.

A breakfast bar on the outer side is an overhang like any other, and the support under it is sized for people leaning on the end rather than for the weight of the stone alone. 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 radius on a walked-past corner is agreed at drawing stage. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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 bar top will not correct a frame that is out of true. 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. Residents are given written notice before anyone attends, and that notice period rather than the workshop is what governs the earliest sensible start. 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.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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. Fixings go into timber that was put there for them.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A goods lift booked by the hour puts a clock on the whole delivery, so pieces go up in a planned order and nothing is handled twice. 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. Cellar bars go down a flight, which is the harder direction.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Wider halls make the carry noticeably easier, and that alone can remove a join that a narrower terrace would have forced into the 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. Noggins first, brackets second, stone last.

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. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. A peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. 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. One level or two, and it is decided early.