Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Roe Green

Yes. Roe Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW9. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Brent. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. Tap holes are drilled at the works, so nothing keeps the van waiting. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Windows are small and set deep, which leaves the run under them dark and the reveal too deep for a plain square end. Bathrooms in houses this size are big enough for a double vanity, and a top with two basins and several tap holes is a worktop by any honest measure: it is nested like one, carried like one and priced like one. Older walls give a vanity nothing straight to sit against. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats.

The hall is the only way in and out for whoever lives there, so it is cleared and then kept clear for as long as pieces are moving. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Nothing is stood on edge once the tap holes are drilled. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The basin travels in the van with the top it belongs to.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop design & quotation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. An en-suite is the same four operations at a smaller size. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. One tap across a building means one drilling setup.

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. 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. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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 wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone. Send the unit layout for every bathroom at once with the basin and tap models against each, so the slab can be nested for all of them. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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. Approval comes before the aperture is drawn, not after.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. 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. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. 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. Where the wall bows, the splash return is scribed to follow it.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. 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 bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Lime plaster on nine inch brick has been patched with gypsum wherever a radiator or a socket has moved, and the two finish at different depths. 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. The same stone as the kitchen, in a narrower cut.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. Cloakrooms are the piece most often forgotten at ordering.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. Where the floor falls away the unit is packed level first, because a top that follows a sloping floor announces it against the tile joints behind. A basin cannot be moved to suit a wall that is out of true.