Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Bank

Yes. Bank is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC2R, EC3V. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. Time-limited bays are camera-enforced across a lot of managed estates, so the unload runs to the clock and the van moves off afterwards. 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. The van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Underfloor heating in the screed means nothing is fixed into the floor, so an island is anchored to the carcasses alone. Bathrooms in these are square, plumb and finished before anyone moves in, so the template is short work and the whole question becomes what the unit is fixed to. Boarded floors give, and a vanity shows it at the tile line. A partition that gives when you lean on it will give under someone sitting at an overhang, and a bonded mitre nearby is where that movement shows first. A vanity has no depth to lose, so where a kitchen run would take a ten millimetre scribe without noticing, a shallow top cannot spare it. The tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled.

Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. A vanity top is lifted once and set down once. A dedicated loading bay or service yard is the easiest arrangement in a managed building, provided the slot is booked and someone has the key to the shutter. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A bathroom slot is booked short and kept short.

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 installation and worktop design & quotation. 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. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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. Shared houses want quartz vanities and no sealing regime. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. A house divided into flats needs a vanity for each of them, and small repeated pieces are the one case where buying a whole slab makes sense. Where every bathroom matches, one slab covers the building.

A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. That shape decides what is left on the slab when the kitchen has been cut, and what is left on the slab is where most vanity tops come from. Yield is why a vanity in a rare stone is still affordable. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Where a peninsula returns into a stud wall the load has to sit on the units, with the wall doing no more than steadying it. 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. A pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one. Confirm the unit depth for each bathroom separately, book the lift if the building wants it booked, and have both taps on site. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. 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. A vanity is small enough to be the one indulgence in a bathroom.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Ceiling heights are held to the minimum the plan allows, so the panel between worktop and wall units is a short piece. Partition walls are plasterboard on studs, and a wall-hung vanity carrying stone wants timber behind the board rather than fixings into plasterboard alone. A rear addition bathroom is cold, narrow and full of pipework.

Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. 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. The bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats.

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. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Dot-and-dab plasterboard sounds solid and is hollow behind, so anything fixed through it has to hit a dab or a batten rather than a void. Where the floor falls away the unit is packed level first, because a top that follows a sloping floor announces it against the tile joints behind. A wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. The kitchen is usually part of the living space, so three edges are read from a sofa rather than from standing height at the sink. What that does to a vanity is push the whole job into a narrow depth, because a bathroom takes the same stone as a kitchen in about two thirds of the width. Nothing about a vanity is standard except the depth of the unit.