Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Rayners Lane

Yes. Rayners Lane is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA2, HA5. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Harrow. A shared drive is only useful if the neighbour is not the one parked behind the van, so we ask which side the standing belongs to before the date is set. 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 plumber and the van rarely want the street on the same day. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The original fitted dresser and the vent to outside air have often left their openings behind the units, unfilled and unrecorded. Walls are thick, old and out of true, which means the vanity is scribed at both ends and the splash return is cut to follow the wall rather than to a straight line. A separate WC becomes a cloakroom with a very small top. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A boxed soil stack takes depth from where the basin wants 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. 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. A cut top is weaker than an uncut one, so it travels differently. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Two pieces and a tube of sealant is the whole delivery.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. 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. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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 rear addition adds a cloakroom before it adds anything else. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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. Shared houses want quartz vanities and no sealing regime.

Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. 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. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. Wall-hung means the wall carries the basin, so the wall gets checked. Confirm the block working hours and any porter sign-in, and have the plumber agree the waste position before we template. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. 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. A void week is the easiest slot for a bathroom.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. 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 booked window suits a bathroom better than it suits a kitchen.

The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. 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.

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. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Thick external walls, deep window reveals and boxed risers mean the runs are templated to what is there rather than to a rectangle. 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. Bathrooms take the same slab and roughly half the width.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Permitted working hours, a porter and a booked lift set a hard finish time on the day whatever stage the fit has reached. A vanity top is where all of that turns up in miniature, with the basin, the tap holes and a splash return crowded into a few hundred millimetres of stone. One visit, sitting between two plumbing visits.