Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in White Hart Lane

Yes. White Hart Lane is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N17. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Haringey. A timed school street shuts the road either side of the school day, so the van goes in between those two windows or it does not go in. 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 shelves come in with the top so nobody returns for them. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The staircase rises over the back room in a good number of these, so a sloping bulkhead sits over one end of the run and a piece cannot be stood on edge beneath it. 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 rear addition bathroom is cold, narrow and full of pipework. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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.

Where the staircase comes down into the hall the bottom treads project into the width, and nothing about that can be moved for the day. 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 is lifted once and set down once. An event-day suspension can override a bay that is perfectly usable the rest of the week, so a booked space gets checked again nearer the time. 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 vanity delivery is minutes at the kerb, not hours.

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. 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 rear addition adds a cloakroom before it adds anything else. 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. Shared houses want quartz vanities and no sealing regime.

Older houses put the boiler or the meter on one of the two walls, and whatever is boxed in around it sets the point where that run has to stop. 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. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. 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. Whoever chooses the tap is setting the hole spacing.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. A two-up two-down has a kitchen that was never designed to be one, so the run is short, the ceiling is low and every millimetre of depth gets argued over. 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. Older walls give a vanity nothing straight to sit against.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Cottage terraces have no hall to speak of and the front door opens almost straight into the room, which makes the carry easier and the protection harder. 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 bathroom carved out of a bedroom keeps the bedroom window.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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 top follows the unit, and the unit follows a level.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. A tiled hall floor takes a dropped corner badly, so boards go down over the tiles before anything comes through the door. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Loft en-suites arrive up the tightest flight in the house.