Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in St Paul's

Yes. St Paul's is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC4M. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. 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. One trip in with the top, the shelves and the adhesive. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

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. A large bathroom is where a double vanity becomes possible. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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 sloping floor is corrected under the unit, not under the stone.

Sign-in at the gate, a permit on the dash and a named contact are usually wanted before anything comes off the van. 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. Where a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. 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. En-suites and family bathrooms rarely take the same depth. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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. Repeat work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought.

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 double vanity is nested like a worktop, not like an offcut. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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. The tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled. Confirm the unit depth for each bathroom separately, book the lift if the building wants it booked, and have both taps on site. A let property is specified for durability and for a fixed window, and both of those are legitimate reasons to choose differently. A let bathroom wants quartz for the same reason a let kitchen does: nothing to seal, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be briefed on. Quartz in a let bathroom, because nothing needs sealing.

The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Riser panels, wall boxes and the boiler cupboard sit in fixed positions the developer will not move for a worktop. 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. One piece, four operations, and nowhere for any of them to move.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. The room is square, the walls are plumb and the floor is flat, so almost every complication in the job belongs to the building rather than the kitchen. 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. Cut for the basin you bought, not for a standard one.

Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. 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. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. 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. Shelves and a window board come out of the same corner of the slab.

Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. The room is genuinely square and the units are plumb, so the visit is more about the building than about the kitchen. Bathrooms in these are square, plumb and finished before anyone moves in, so the template is short work and the question moves to what the unit is fixed to. The soil stack decides the basin position more than taste does.