Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in West Green

Yes. West Green 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. Controlled hours that end in the middle of the afternoon make the second half of the day easy and put the whole problem in the first half. 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. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Many were built with a solid sub-floor to the rear rooms, so the kitchen floor is concrete and level while the front of the house is suspended timber. The bathroom in one of these is almost never original: it is a later room over the back addition, or a bedroom divided in two. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing. A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Half-tiled walls leave a line the top has to meet.

A side gate hung to open outward against a fence post is narrower in use than it measures, and lifting the gate off its hinges is usually the quickest win on the route. 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. A vanity top goes wherever a person will go. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. 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. A booked window suits a bathroom better than it suits a kitchen.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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 repeated top is still drilled to the taps actually bought. 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. 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. A rear addition adds a cloakroom before it adds anything else.

A peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. 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 bathroom is drawn while the kitchen is still on the bench. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Where the sill lands inside the height an upstand would occupy there is no upstand, and the stone either dies into the reveal or stops short of it. 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 cloakroom under a stair slope limits the tap before the top. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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. A fixed changeover date leaves no room to redrill a top.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Carried flat on a board once the aperture has been cut.

Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Edwardian terraces are wider and taller than the Victorian houses next to them, so the kitchen usually takes a full-width rear room rather than a narrow outrigger. 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. Stud partitions want noggins before a wall-hung unit goes up.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. The shelves come in with the top so nobody returns for them.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. Casement handles and stays swing down into the space above the worktop, so the clearance that counts is the one measured with the window open. 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. What is behind the plaster decides how a vanity is fixed.