Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Paddington

Yes. Paddington 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. Building management is often the real gate rather than the bay itself, since the barrier, the shutter and the lift each need someone with a fob. 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. No basin aperture is worth rushing for a parking bay. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Ceiling heights are held to the minimum the plan allows, so the panel between worktop and wall units is a short piece. Bathrooms in these are square, plumb and finished before anyone moves in, so the template is short work and the whole question becomes what the unit is fixed to. Where the floor is solid, the unit sits where it is put. Where a peninsula returns into a stud wall the load has to sit on the units, with the wall doing no more than steadying it. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The unit is packed level before the top goes near it.

The barrier, the entry code and the estate rules decide when a van can get near the door, and none of that is negotiable on the day. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. The staircase is the last stage of every bathroom carry. Time-limited bays are camera-enforced across a lot of managed estates, so the unload runs to the clock and the van moves off afterwards. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The bathroom pieces come off last and go in first.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Replacing one plot years after handover is the problem nobody plans for, because a quartz colour can be reordered and a granite block cannot. 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. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme. New-build kitchens are usually smaller than the plan suggests once the appliances are in, so the usable run is shorter than the drawn run. 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. A building turned over floor by floor needs the batch held.

A peninsula is an island with one end tied to a run, which means the join between them has to be planned rather than allowed to happen. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Small pieces are drawn onto the plan, never left to chance. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. 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 boxed soil stack takes depth from where the basin wants it. Confirm the unit depth for each bathroom separately, book the lift if the building wants it booked, and have both taps on site. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. 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. Whoever signs it off is whoever chooses the basin.

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. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Dot-and-dab plasterboard sounds solid and is hollow behind, so anything fixed through it has to hit a dab or a batten rather than a void. 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. Wall-hung means the wall carries the basin, so the wall gets checked.

Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. A dedicated loading bay or service yard is the easiest arrangement in a managed building, provided the slot is booked and someone has the key to the shutter. 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. A vanity fit ends before most parking restrictions do.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Everything arrives through one controlled entrance with a booking sheet, and a delivery that misses its slot waits. 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. The same stone as the kitchen, in a narrower cut.

Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Every flat on the floor is the same plan handed left and right, so the room is predictable even where the building is not. Partition walls are plasterboard on studs, and a wall-hung vanity carrying stone wants timber behind the board rather than fixings into plasterboard alone. An original bathroom is usually the smallest room upstairs.