Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Upper Holloway

Yes. Upper Holloway is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N19. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. 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. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Floors are the original joists with a later acoustic layer laid over them, and that layer is not flat where it meets the doorways. 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. High ceilings do nothing for a vanity, but the reveals do. Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. 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.

A carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. 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 bath is usually in the way before the doorway is. A bay suspension carries a fee and a notice period, and the notice period is the part that catches people out when a date moves. 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 particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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 landlord specifying once is specifying tap holes once. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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. En-suites and family bathrooms rarely take the same depth.

A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. 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. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. 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. 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. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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. Wall-hung units suit a bathroom somebody else cleans.

The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. Say what you have and where it came from before anything is booked, because thickness and batch decide what can be done with it. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. It usually means the bathroom is decided late, after the kitchen, and by then the offcut that would have suited it has gone. Repeat work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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. The top follows the unit, and the unit follows a level.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. The communal stair is wide and handsome and the flat door at the top of it is a standard leaf, which is where a long piece stops. The bathroom in one of these is usually a later addition over the back kitchen, so the walls are thinner, the floor moves and a vanity has to sit level in a room that is not. A pod bathroom inside a shell has walls built last week.

Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Party wall settlement pulls the floor down at one side of the room, so a long run reads level at one end and not at the other. 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. Bathrooms take the same slab and roughly half the width.