Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Canonbury

Yes. Canonbury is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N1. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. Where the household has used up the visitor permits it gets for the year, the remaining options are a suspension or a paid bay and both belong on the quote. 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. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

These were built with a scullery that has since been swallowed by an extension, leaving a change of floor level roughly where the run crosses. 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. What the wall is made of decides how the unit is fixed. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled.

Every internal doorway on the way through is another frame to clear, and internal doors come off their hinges rather than being propped open. 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. The way into a bathroom ends at a door that opens inward. Estate roads inside a controlled zone are sometimes managed privately rather than by the council, which changes who has to be asked. 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 really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. 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. 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. En-suites and family bathrooms rarely take the same depth. 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. Repeat work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought.

Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. 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 waste from a basin aperture is what a shelf is cut from. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. 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. 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. An agent sees the vanity line and asks about tiling instead.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. A controlled parking zone means either a visitor permit sorted in advance or a suspended bay, and a suspension is applied for days ahead rather than on the morning. 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. Everything the bathroom needs comes off the van at once.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Nothing in a house of this age is square, and the kitchen is usually the part that has been altered most often. 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.

An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. 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. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. The rear room has a bay or a wide window onto the garden, so the sink length is short and the real working length is on the return. Either way the walls are thin, the floor is boards over shallow joists and nothing meets at a right angle, so the vanity is scribed at both ends and the unit is fixed back to the wall as well as standing on the floor. The bathroom in a house like this is rarely where it started.