Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Arkley

Yes. Arkley is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EN5. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. A vanity fit is a short visit with one or two pieces in it, so the van stands only for as long as it takes to walk them in. A vanity delivery is minutes at the kerb, not hours. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A range or an Aga in an original recess is usually immovable, so the run is designed around it and the clearances come from the appliance. A freestanding bath in the middle of the room pushes the vanity to a wall and often under a window, so the window board is drawn with the top rather than added later from a second offcut. Concrete walls take a bracket well and a chase badly. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A basin cannot be moved to suit a wall that is out of true.

Concierge buildings want the goods entrance, a booked lift and proof of insurance, all of which is straightforward when it is asked for a week out. A vanity is the one piece of stone that route will not usually defeat, because a top cut to a standard unit depth weighs what one person can manage. Protection goes down the stairs as well as along the hall. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. One trip in with the top, the shelves and the adhesive.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. 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. 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. Work of that kind brings en-suites with it, and an en-suite vanity is a smaller piece again carrying exactly the same four operations. One drawing per bathroom, however alike they look. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Where several bathrooms are done in one building the tops come off one slab run, because two greys from two batches sit badly on adjoining floors. A second bathroom is worth ordering with the first.

A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Shelves and a window board come out of the same corner of the slab. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. The boxed soil stack in the corner is the usual version of it upstairs, and a top that notches round one loses depth exactly where the basin wanted it. The waste position is fixed before the aperture is drawn. Send the unit layout for every bathroom at once with the basin and tap models against each, so the slab can be nested for all of them. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. Who is paying decides the material here more than anywhere else, because a vanity is small enough that an expensive stone stops being an expensive decision. Whoever signs it off is whoever chooses the basin.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. A wall-hung unit puts the whole weight into the wall rather than onto the floor, so what the wall is built of stops being a detail. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. 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. It usually means the bathroom is decided late, after the kitchen, and by then the offcut that would have suited it has gone. Small tops are where a slab finally gets fully used.

Carcasses stay. Surface changes. That is the whole of it. What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. A bathroom booked on its own rarely fills a day, so it can be put into whichever part of the day the street is easiest. The van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A downdraught extractor takes a long slot out of the middle of the piece and a motor housing out of the cabinet below it, so what sits under the top is settled before anything is cut. Where the kitchen swallows the whole slab there is no offcut worth having, and the vanity then has to be priced against material bought for itself. The bathroom order is cheapest while the kitchen is still open.