Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Belsize Park

Yes. Belsize Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW3. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. A bay suspension carries a fee and a notice period, and the notice period is the part that catches people out when a date moves. 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. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

There is a door to the garden, a door to the hall and often a door to a utility, so the perimeter run is interrupted three times. Bathrooms in houses this size are big enough for a double vanity, and a top with two basins and several tap holes is a worktop by any honest measure: it is nested like one, carried like one and priced like one. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing. Stud centres are almost never where the brackets would like to be, so fixing positions get set from the framing and the stone is designed to suit. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats.

Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. 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. A cut top is weaker than an uncut one, so it travels differently. Some zones are controlled for a short window in the middle of the day and open either side of it, which makes the timing of the visit the whole question. 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.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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. Where every bathroom matches, one slab covers the building. 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. 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 landlord specifying once is specifying tap holes once.

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. 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. The thickness follows the kitchen unless you ask otherwise. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by 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. A wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone. 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. A void week is the easiest slot for a bathroom.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. 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. Lime plaster on nine inch brick has been patched with gypsum wherever a radiator or a socket has moved, and the two finish at different depths. 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. A cloakroom top and an en-suite top are one job at two sizes.

The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. A deep butler sink and a boiling tap on the same length put two heavy cut-outs within a metre of each other. 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. Stud partitions want noggins before a wall-hung unit goes up.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. 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. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. A suspension only works if the cones and the notice are actually there on the morning, and now and then a car is sitting in the bay regardless. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. The van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. 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. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A double vanity is nested like a worktop, not like an offcut.