Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Hyde Park Estate

Yes. Hyde Park Estate is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W2. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. One trip in with the top, the shelves and the adhesive. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Georgian houses put the kitchen in a basement or a rear closet wing, and the stairs down to it are the tightest part of the whole route. 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. The bathroom in a house like this is rarely where it started. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Half-tiled walls leave a line the top has to meet.

Sign-in at the gate, a permit on the dash and a named contact are usually wanted before anything comes off the van. 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. Offcut-sized pieces are the easiest stone in the trade to move. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating 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. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. 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. 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. En-suites and family bathrooms rarely take the same depth.

A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. 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 vanity comes off what the kitchen leaves behind. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

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. 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 cloakroom under a stair slope limits the tap before the top. 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. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. 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. 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. What is behind the plaster decides how a vanity is fixed.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Where a run finishes hard against a wall the last few millimetres are scribed, and where it finishes in open floor it is cut square and polished, which is two different jobs on one length. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. One slab run, so the bathroom matches the kitchen.

The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Nobody carries a drilled vanity top by one end.

Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. 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. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. The bathroom in one of these is usually a later addition over the back kitchen, so the walls are thinner, the floor moves and a vanity has to sit level in a room that is not. Boarded floors give, and a vanity shows it at the tile line.