Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Golden Lane

Yes. Golden Lane is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC1Y. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. 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. 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. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

A service duct runs between the kitchen and the bathroom stacked above it, and access to that duct stays open whatever the layout does. Bathrooms in this stock are compact, squarely built and take a short vanity that will come out of almost any offcut, which makes them among the cheapest bathroom tops we cut. A rear addition bathroom is cold, narrow and full of pipework. 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. Where the wall bows, the splash return is scribed to follow it.

A car that answers every floor button pressed while a piece is standing in it needs to be held on the key, and the key usually lives at a desk that wants notice. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. A cut top is weaker than an uncut one, so it travels differently. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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. A booked window suits a bathroom better than it suits a kitchen.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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. Repeat bathrooms come cheaper per top, not per square metre. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. 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. A converted house needs a vanity on every floor.

A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. 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. What the kitchen cannot use, the vanity usually can. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting 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. 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 basin cannot be moved to suit a wall that is out of true. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. 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. Honed stone in a bathroom asks more of whoever cleans it.

An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. 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. 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. The waste position is fixed before the aperture is drawn.

Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one.

A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. The external wall is a concrete panel with a modest window, so the run under it sits in a shallow reveal with a hard cill. The service riser is boxed into a corner of the room, and the top is notched round it with a radiused internal corner rather than a square one. Older walls give a vanity nothing straight to sit against.

Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. It usually means the bathroom is decided late, after the kitchen, and by then the offcut that would have suited it has gone. The bathroom is decided late and the offcut has usually gone.