Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Maida Vale

Yes. Maida Vale is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W9. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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. The van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The lift is a small passenger car with a gate, and the alternative is a stone stair winding round the shaft with a turn at every half-landing. A bathroom in a block like this was usually carved out of a larger room, so the proportions are odd, the ceiling is high and the window reveals are deep enough to be worth cutting in stone. The window over the basin is the one the top answers to. A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A sloping floor is corrected under the unit, not under the stone.

Where a basement car park is the only way up from the parking level the carry starts below ground, and two lifts in one building rarely share the same internal dimensions. 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 landing turn matters more than the front door for a bathroom. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A bathroom slot is booked short and kept short.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. 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. Batched vanity tops are templated in one visit. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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. Two basins in one room is one piece, not two.

Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. 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. One template visit covers both rooms if both are ready. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. 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 tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled. Confirm the block working hours and any porter sign-in, and have the plumber agree the waste position before we template. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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. An en-suite in a let flat is specified like the bathroom next door.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Nothing changes hands until after the template. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Permitted working hours, a porter and a booked lift set a hard finish time on the day whatever stage the fit has reached. 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. Small enough to carry, awkward enough to plan.

A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. 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.

Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Where the sill lands inside the height an upstand would occupy there is no upstand, and the stone either dies into the reveal or stops short of it. 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. A pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Standing a three-metre length on end takes more headroom outside the car than inside it, and a low lobby ceiling is what actually stops it. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. An en-suite off a bedroom adds a second flight, not a second job.