Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Gloucester Road

Yes. Gloucester Road is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW7. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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. Two pieces and a tube of sealant is the whole delivery. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Permitted works hours are commonly weekdays with a late start and an early finish, so a one-day fit is planned around the porter and the lift. A bathroom in a block like this was usually carved out of a larger room, so the proportions are odd, the ceiling is high and the window reveals are deep enough to be worth cutting in stone. Concrete walls take a bracket well and a chase badly. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. What is behind the plaster decides how a vanity is fixed.

Lift doors close on a timer that takes no account of somebody holding a worktop, so a pair of hands stays on the buttons at each end. 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 cut top is weaker than an uncut one, so it travels differently. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A booked window suits a bathroom better than it suits a kitchen.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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.

Corner sinks and corner hobs sit exactly where the joint wants to be, so on an L the cut-out positions get settled before the join positions do. 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. Small pieces are drawn onto the plan, never left to chance. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. 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. The top follows the unit, and the unit follows a level. Confirm the block working hours and any porter sign-in, and have the plumber agree the waste position before we template. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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. A fixed changeover date leaves no room to redrill a top.

The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. The carcasses stay put. Only the surface changes. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. The shelves come in with the top so nobody returns for them.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. The kitchen was a service room at the back of the flat, so it is a long way from the front door along a corridor with two turns in it. Walls are thick, old and out of true, which means the vanity is scribed at both ends and the splash return is cut to follow the wall rather than to a straight line. A boxed riser in the corner is the usual obstacle upstairs.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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 shelf in a shower niche is scribed on three sides.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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. A vanity has no depth to give away to a scribe.