Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Kensal Town

Yes. Kensal Town is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W10. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. 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. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Internal walls are lath on timber studs while the flank walls are brick, so two walls in the same kitchen take a fixing completely differently. 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. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return has to meet. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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.

The lift has to be booked and blanketed before anything moves, and that booking needs to cover the old tops coming out as well as the new stone going in. 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 double vanity is a worktop as far as the carry is concerned. A permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole morning. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Tap holes are drilled at the works, so nothing keeps the van waiting.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. 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. En-suites and family bathrooms rarely take the same depth. 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. Repeat work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought.

Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. 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. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. 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. Managed stock usually comes with its own rules about working hours, waste, and who is allowed on site. 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. Access to a tenanted bathroom is arranged, not assumed.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. 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 slab run, so the bathroom matches the kitchen.

Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. 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 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. The top follows the unit, and the unit follows a level.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. There is usually a step down into the back addition, so the kitchen floor and the hall floor are not the same level and neither of them is flat. What that does to a vanity is push the whole job into a narrow depth, because a bathroom takes the same stone as a kitchen in about two thirds of the width. Shelves and a window board come off the same offcut.

Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Where the lift will not take the longest run we design a join in rather than gamble, because a piece that will not go up has to go back on the van. 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. The landing turn matters more than the front door for a bathroom.