Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Kingsbury

Yes. Kingsbury is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW9. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Brent. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. 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 bay for twenty minutes is enough for a vanity. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

These were built with a separate dining room, and most have had the wall between it and the kitchen taken out with a steel put in above. Half-tiled walls are the norm, and the tile line is what the splash return has to meet, which is a decision taken before machining rather than discovered afterwards. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return has to meet. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan.

The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. 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. Protection goes down the stairs as well as along the hall. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. 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. We arrive with the offcut pieces already labelled by room.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop design & quotation and worktop fabrication. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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 small tops nest better than one large one.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. 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. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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. The scribe on a vanity is measured in depth it cannot spare. Settle the tiling height and the basin model first, and let us know whether the unit is standing on the floor or hanging off the wall. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. 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.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. An island carries its own edge detail all the way round, so a mitred 100mm apron on four sides is four mitres cut, bonded and polished before the piece ever leaves the bench. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. One template visit covers both rooms if both are ready.

A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. 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.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Waterfall ends are cut in sequence off the length either side of the top so the vein carries down the leg, and that sequence is gone the moment a piece has to be recut. 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. The vanity comes off what the kitchen leaves behind.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. A side return glazed over gives the room a second aspect and a second floor level, because the old external threshold is still under the finish. The original bathroom here is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against two walls, so both ends are scribed. A separate WC becomes a cloakroom with a very small top.