Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Primrose Hill

Yes. Primrose Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW1, NW3. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A booked window suits a bathroom better than it suits a kitchen. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

A basement kitchen has a flagged or concrete floor laid straight onto the ground, so it is solid, cold and rarely within ten millimetres of level. 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. A bathroom carved out of a bedroom keeps the bedroom window. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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.

An inward-opening door swinging back against the wall leaves less clear opening than the frame measures, and a storm porch in front of it is tighter again. 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. Nothing is stood on edge once the tap holes are drilled. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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. The shelves come in with the top so nobody returns for them.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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. Two basins in one room is one piece, not two. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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. Loft rooms bring an en-suite and a very tight flight.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. 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. A vanity is nested last and cut from what is left. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. A step up off the pavement means the piece is lifted to the threshold before it is carried anywhere, and that first lift is the one that wants four hands. 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.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Where the kitchen eats the slab, the bathroom buys its own.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. The original front door is narrow and the hall is often the only way in, which puts a ceiling on the longest single piece. 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. A vanity is where an expensive slab stops being expensive.

The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. The closet wing is a narrow projection at the back with windows on two sides, which leaves very little continuous wall for a run. The bathroom in one of these is usually a later addition over the back kitchen, so the walls are thinner, the floor moves and a vanity has to sit level in a room that is not. Deep reveals turn a window board into a real piece of stone.