Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Highbury

Yes. Highbury is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N5. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. Permit hours are what matters, not the permit itself, because a bay that frees up at six in the evening is no use for a template at ten. 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. A bathroom return visit is planned around the street, not the diary. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

The lean-to roof drains into a valley gutter against the addition next door, and a long leak there shows at the head of the kitchen wall rather than on the ceiling. 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 bathroom over a kitchen has its waste run already decided. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one.

A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that corner. 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 vanity top is lifted once and set down once. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. 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. Tap holes are drilled at the works, so nothing keeps the van waiting.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop installation. 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. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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 vanity is the piece that makes a converted flat read finished. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. Several vanity tops off one slab run, or they will not match.

Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. 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 bathroom pieces are labelled on the nest before the saw runs. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. Half-tiled walls leave a line the top has to meet. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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. Nothing in a vanity quote is bundled into the kitchen.

A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Carrying down a flight is not the easier direction, because the weight runs ahead of the crew and whoever is at the bottom has no way of stopping a slip. What the route really decides for a bathroom is the shelving and the window board, since long thin pieces are the ones that break when they are twisted round a turn. Loft en-suites arrive up the tightest flight in the house.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. What the kitchen cannot use, the vanity usually can.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. 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. One template visit covers both rooms if both are ready.

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. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. The bathroom upstairs sits directly over the kitchen, so its waste comes down in a boxed corner from floor to ceiling that no worktop is going to move. 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. High ceilings do nothing for a vanity, but the reveals do.