Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Camden Town

Yes. Camden Town is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW1. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A second visit for a splash return is one we would rather avoid. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The front door of the building sits at the top of a step off a tiled path, so the carry starts outside the building rather than at the door of the flat. The bathroom in one of these is almost never original: it is a later room over the back addition, or a bedroom divided in two. An original bathroom is usually the smallest room upstairs. A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The unit is packed level before the top goes near it.

Spindles and a newel cap stand proud of the string, so the usable width on a turn is measured to the handrail rather than to the wall behind it. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. The window board is the piece that catches a door frame. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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. Short jobs suffer most from a van that has to move.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. En-suites and family bathrooms rarely take the same depth. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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. Repeat work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought.

Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. 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. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. 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 boxed soil stack takes depth from where the basin wants it. Have the vanity unit fixed and levelled, and the basin and tap on site, before the templater arrives, and tell us what is inside any boxing. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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. The lead time on a vanity is the lead time on a kitchen.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. The top step is rarely the end of it, because a door swinging out onto the landing has to be held back before a piece can come off the flight. What the route really decides for a bathroom is the shelving and the window board, since long thin pieces are the ones that break when they are twisted round a turn. Nothing is stood on edge once the tap holes are drilled.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. A picture rail, a deep skirting and a moulded architrave all sit in the way of anything that assumes flat wall from floor to ceiling. 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 depth sets the piece, not the length of the wall.

Order is what matters: a slab is templated before it is cut, so an uncut slab is straightforward and one already machined for another kitchen is not. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. It usually means the bathroom is decided late, after the kitchen, and by then the offcut that would have suited it has gone. Several small tops nest better than one large one.

Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. 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.