Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in North Kensington

Yes. North Kensington is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. 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. Short jobs suffer most from a van that has to move. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

The stairs come down against the wall the addition opens off, so the doorway into the kitchen is offset and the corner beside it is taken by the cupboard under the flight. 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. An original bathroom is usually the smallest room upstairs. 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. The tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled.

A car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a three-metre worktop however it is stood, and there is no trimming it on the landing. 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. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The whole bathroom fits on a trolley in one load.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. Shared-house kitchens take heavier use from more people than a family kitchen does, and the surface gets chosen on that basis rather than on looks. 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 single building holds several small kitchens, the work arrives as one job rather than four, and it should be cut off the same slab run so the batches genuinely match. 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 full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. 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. Offcut stock is the cheapest stone a vanity will ever sit on. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

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. 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. A pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one. 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. 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. Marble on a vanity marks, and that is said before it is cut.

Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. The addition is a brick narrower than the house it hangs off, which leaves a stub of the original rear wall standing square to the run at the doorway end. Either way the walls are thin, the floor is boards over shallow joists and nothing meets at a right angle, so the vanity is scribed at both ends and the unit is fixed back to the wall as well as standing on the floor. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return has to meet.

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. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. 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. Two rooms, one batch, one delivery.

What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. 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. 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 vanity top is lifted once and set down once.

The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. 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 bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats.