Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Brent Cross

Yes. Brent Cross is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW4, NW2. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. 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. 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. Everything the bathroom needs comes off the van at once. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen sits at the rear with a door to the garden and a window over the sink, so the useful run is broken into two short lengths. The original bathroom in these houses is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against a wall at each end, so both ends are scribed and there is no tolerance left between them. Loft en-suites lose their splash return to the slope. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one.

Where only one car serves the building a breakdown on the morning halts the job outright, so the fallback route is worked out at template rather than on the landing. 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. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A cloakroom top is a single armful off the tail lift.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. 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. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. The vanity is the piece that makes a converted flat read finished. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Several vanity tops off one slab run, or they will not match.

The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. 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. Two bathrooms nest better together than either does alone. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. Half-tiled walls leave a line the top has to meet. Settle the tiling height and the basin model first, and let us know whether the unit is standing on the floor or hanging off the wall. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. 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. Access to a tenanted bathroom is arranged, not assumed.

Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The waste from a basin aperture is what a shelf is cut from.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. A shallow bay or a squared-off rear window means the run beneath it is rarely the same depth at both ends. 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. The bridge of stone behind the basin is the part that matters.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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 cloakroom under a stair slope limits the tap before the top.

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. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. A narrow top nests into waste a kitchen cut list would otherwise throw away, which makes it the cheapest stone in the job. Small pieces are drawn onto the plan, never left to chance.