Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Underhill

Yes. Underhill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EN5. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. 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. A vanity delivery is minutes at the kerb, not hours. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The original kitchen was a small rear room with a larder and a back door, and nearly all of them have since been opened into the dining room. The original bathroom in these houses is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against a wall at each end, so both ends are scribed and there is no tolerance left between them. A pod bathroom inside a shell has walls built last week. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A cloakroom under a stair slope limits the tap before the top.

Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. 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 way into a bathroom ends at a door that opens inward. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. One trip in with the top, the shelves and the adhesive.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. 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 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. Two basins in one room is one piece, not two. 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. Loft rooms bring an en-suite and a very tight flight.

Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. 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. The thickness follows the kitchen unless you ask otherwise. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. 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. What is behind the plaster decides how a vanity is fixed. Settle the tiling height and the basin model first, and let us know whether the unit is standing on the floor or hanging off the wall. Managed stock usually comes with its own rules about working hours, waste, and who is allowed on site. 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. Keys, dates and the basin should sit with the same person.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A double vanity is nested like a worktop, not like an offcut.

The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. The outside walls are cavity and the party wall is solid brick, so fixings behave differently on the two long walls of the same room. Half-tiled walls are the norm, and the tile line is what the splash return has to meet, which is a decision taken before machining rather than discovered afterwards. The window over the basin is the one the top answers to.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. The carcasses stay. Only the surface changes. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. 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 van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. The extension is commonly a flat-roofed addition of the seventies or eighties with a shallower floor build-up, so the two halves of the room do not sit at one level. The original bathroom here is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against two walls, so both ends are scribed. Loft en-suites lose their splash return to the slope.