Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Blackfriars

Yes. Blackfriars is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC4V, EC4Y. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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. Tap holes are drilled at the works, so nothing keeps the van waiting. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These buildings have firm rules about what can be propped open, left in a lobby or carried through the residents entrance. 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. The window over the basin is the one the top answers to. Taped internal angles in plasterboard belly at the corner, so the run picks up a few millimetres over the last 300mm and a plan-angle mitre will not close. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone.

Goods lifts and passenger lifts fail differently: one has a rated load that matters, the other has a door aperture that matters more. 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. Nobody carries a drilled vanity top by one end. 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. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The basin travels in the van with the top it belongs to.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop fabrication and worktop replacement. 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. 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 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. The vanity is the piece that makes a converted flat read finished. 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. 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. Several vanity tops off one slab run, or they will not match.

Because a peninsula is seen from both sides, the underside of any overhang gets the same edge treatment as the top, which is easy to leave out of a spec. 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. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Where a partition has been built off the floor screed rather than off the slab, it moves, and a mitre bonded across that corner is the first thing to open. 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. Where the wall bows, the splash return is scribed to follow it. Confirm the unit depth for each bathroom separately, book the lift if the building wants it booked, and have both taps on site. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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.

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. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. The kitchen usually sits along the internal spine of the plan with the glazing at the far end, so the run itself has no window and no daylight on it. Bathrooms in these are square, plumb and finished before anyone moves in, so the template is short work and the question moves to what the unit is fixed to. Loft en-suites lose their splash return to the slope.

Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. 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. It usually means the bathroom is decided late, after the kitchen, and by then the offcut that would have suited it has gone. An en-suite is the same four operations at a smaller size.

Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. 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. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. An unsupported overhang off a stud wall wants noggins fixed between the studs before the boarding goes on, and once it is boarded and skimmed that option has gone. 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 basin cannot be moved to suit a wall that is out of true.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. These flats are built with a floating floor over a concrete slab for acoustic reasons, and it deflects slightly under the weight of a stone island. Most of these flats have an en-suite as well as a bathroom, and the two rarely take the same depth, so they are drawn as two pieces rather than one repeated. Where the floor is solid, the unit sits where it is put.