Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in St Ann's

Yes. St Ann's is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N15. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Haringey. A suspension is charged by the bay and by the day, so the number of metres asked for is worth getting right the first time. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. No basin aperture is worth rushing for a parking bay. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Deep original skirting is often left in behind the units, standing them off the wall, so the back edge of the stone is plotted where the carcasses actually sit. 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. An original bathroom is usually the smallest room upstairs. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A basin cannot be moved to suit a wall that is out of true.

Where the staircase comes down into the hall the bottom treads project into the width, and nothing about that can be moved for 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. The landing turn matters more than the front door for a bathroom. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. 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 bathroom pieces come off last and go in first.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. 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. A converted house needs a vanity on every floor. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. The bathroom is decided late and the offcut has usually gone.

Three stools along one side need more clear length than most plans allow, and once the seating depth is fixed the piece either grows or it loses a seat. 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 material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. The waste position is fixed before the aperture is drawn. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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. Owner bathrooms get the slab viewed; let ones get the sample.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. 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.

Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Lath and plaster, a settled floor and a hall with a turn in it are the three things that decide how this job runs. 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. We seat the basin. Your plumber connects it.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. These were built late enough to have a damp course and proper footings, so the front of the house is close to true and the rear addition holding the kitchen is the part that has dropped. Where a bedroom has been divided to make a bathroom the window sits off centre to the new room and the vanity ends up under it, which puts the window board in the order rather than outside it. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return has to meet.