Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in West Hampstead

Yes. West Hampstead is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW6. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Where the household has used up the visitor permits it gets for the year, the remaining options are a suspension or a paid bay and both belong on the quote. 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. Two pieces and a tube of sealant is the whole delivery. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Cornice, picture rails and deep skirting survive in converted rooms, so the run stands off the wall and the back edge follows the units rather than the plaster. 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. A pod bathroom inside a shell has walls built last week. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. What is behind the plaster decides how a vanity is fixed.

Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. A vanity top is lifted once and set down once. Estate roads inside a controlled zone are sometimes managed privately rather than by the council, which changes who has to be asked. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. 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 splashbacks & upstands and worktop templating. 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. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. Repeat work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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. Several small tops nest better than one large one.

A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. 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 cloakroom top is the easiest piece on any nesting plan. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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 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 top follows the unit, and the unit follows a level. 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. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced 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. Honed stone in a bathroom asks more of whoever cleans it.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Lath and plaster, a settled floor and a hall with a turn in it are the three things that decide how this job runs. 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. A window reveal in a bathroom is stone as much as the vanity is.

The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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. A shelf in a shower niche is scribed on three sides.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. A controlled parking zone means either a visitor permit sorted in advance or a suspended bay, and a suspension is applied for days ahead rather than on the morning. 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 shelves come in with the top so nobody returns for them.

Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. It usually means the bathroom is decided late, after the kitchen, and by then the offcut that would have suited it has gone. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme.