Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Cheapside

Yes. Cheapside is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC2V. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. 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. 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. Ordered with the kitchen, the bathroom costs no extra journey. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The flat entrance door and the internal doorways are usually tighter than the communal stairs, which is the opposite of what most people assume. 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. A separate WC becomes a cloakroom with a very small top. A brick pier standing into the run divides it in two, and the join goes against the pier where a clear wall would have needed no join 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. Where the wall bows, the splash return is scribed to follow it.

The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. 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 double vanity is a worktop as far as the carry is concerned. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. 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 return visit is planned around the street, not the diary.

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. Where a single building holds several small kitchens, the work arrives as one job rather than four, and it should be cut off the same slab run so the batches genuinely match. 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. A converted house needs a vanity on every floor. Small kitchens in a shared house are all short runs and tight cut-out spacing, which is more bench work per square metre than one large kitchen would be. 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 bathroom is decided late and the offcut has usually gone.

The joint where a peninsula meets the main run wants a gable directly under it, and where the units do not offer one, steel goes in to carry that joint instead. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The bathroom order is cheapest while the kitchen is still open. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Where the structure cannot be cut into, the stone is relieved instead, and a relief that deep changes both the yield off the slab and how the piece is handled. 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. 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 owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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.

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. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. An intruding steel column, a brick pier or a downstand breaks a run that would otherwise have been one clean piece. 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 waste position is fixed before the aperture is drawn.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. 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. 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. Where the kitchen swallows the whole slab there is no offcut worth having, and the vanity then has to be priced against material bought for itself. A cloakroom top is the easiest piece on any nesting plan.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Cornice, picture rails and deep skirting survive in converted rooms, so the run stands off the wall and the back edge follows the units rather than the plaster. 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. Old pipework is boxed rather than moved, and the top notches round it.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. 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. Lease conditions and the other flats in the building decide when noisy work can happen, so the fitting day has a start and a finish that are not ours to set. The bathroom in one of these is usually a later addition over the back kitchen, so the walls are thinner, the floor moves and a vanity has to sit level in a room that is not. Square rooms make short work of a vanity template.