Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Clerkenwell

Yes. Clerkenwell is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC1. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Short jobs suffer most from a van that has to move. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Steel columns and downstands land where the frame put them, which is frequently in the middle of what would otherwise be a clean run. That makes the template straightforward and moves the work onto the services, which run exposed or in boxing along a wall and get notched round rather than cut back. A large bathroom is where a double vanity becomes possible. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. 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.

A rated load sounds ample until three lengths of granite and two fitters are standing on it, so the stone goes up one piece at a time. 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. Two hands to a shelf, four to a double vanity. Where a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. 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. The whole bathroom fits on a trolley in one load.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. 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. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. Cloakrooms are the piece most often forgotten at ordering. 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. 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 bathrooms come cheaper per top, not per square metre.

A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. 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. Ordered later, the batch match is a gamble rather than a plan. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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. Confirm what is behind the board where the unit hangs, and send the goods lift and door dimensions if the pieces include shelving. Inventories record the condition of a kitchen at both ends of a tenancy, which is a practical argument for a surface that looks the same in its fifth year as its first. 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. Owner bathrooms get the slab viewed; let ones get the sample.

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. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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. Wall-hung means the wall carries the basin, so the wall gets checked.

A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. Blankets on the walls and a board on the floor go in before the first piece, because a scratched car becomes a bill from the managing agent long after the kitchen is finished. 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 staircase is the last stage of every bathroom carry.

If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. 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. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. A converted house needs a vanity on every floor.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. 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. The offcut decides the colour more often than the brochure does.