Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Hoxton

Yes. Hoxton is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N1. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. No basin aperture is worth rushing for a parking bay. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Deck access means a long open walkway from the lift or the stair to the front door, and that walk happens with the piece on edge in whatever weather there is. 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. Concrete walls take a bracket well and a chase badly. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A shelf in a shower niche is scribed on three sides.

Bollards, planters and a one-way service road can turn what looks like a ten-metre carry into a fifty-metre one. 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. The turn at the head of the stairs decides a double vanity. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. 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 bathroom pieces come off last and go in first.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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 landlord specifying once is specifying tap holes once. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. En-suites and family bathrooms rarely take the same depth.

Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The vanity comes off what the kitchen leaves behind. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

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. 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 vanity has no depth to give away to a scribe. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. 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. Keys, dates and the basin should sit with the same person.

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. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. 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. 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 unit is packed level before the top goes near it.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. A maisonette puts the kitchen on one of two levels, so an internal staircase may be part of the route as well as the communal one. The complication is the service riser boxed into a corner: the top is notched round it with a radiused internal corner, never a square one, and the notch is machined at the works from a measurement taken at the finished face. A boxed riser in the corner is the usual obstacle upstairs.

Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. 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. Where the floor falls away the unit is packed level first, because a top that follows a sloping floor announces it against the tile joints behind. A boxed soil stack takes depth from where the basin wants it.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. The barrier, the entry code and the estate rules decide when a van can get near the door, and none of that is negotiable on the day. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Offcut-sized pieces are the easiest stone in the trade to move.