Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in World's End

Yes. World's End is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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 fit ends before most parking restrictions do. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

A maisonette puts the kitchen on one of two levels, so an internal staircase may be part of the route as well as the communal one. The complication is the service riser boxed into a corner: the top is notched round it with a radiused internal corner, never a square one, and the notch is machined at the works from a measurement taken at the finished face. Old pipework is boxed rather than moved, and the top notches round it. Where a column lands in the run the template plots its actual outline so the stone is cut to fit around it rather than stopped short and filled. 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 sloping floor is corrected under the unit, not under the stone.

A car will often hold more than its doors will admit, and it is the clear width between the door edges that a piece actually has to pass through. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. The turn at the head of the stairs decides a double vanity. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The plumber and the van rarely want the street on the same day.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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 building turned over floor by floor needs the batch held.

An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. 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. Yield is why a vanity in a rare stone is still affordable. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Exposed structure means the back edge is not a straight line at all, and a scribe of fifteen or twenty millimetres across a run is normal. 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 tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. Access is arranged through a managing agent or a scheme office rather than with the household directly, so a date gets confirmed once in writing and moving it costs a fortnight. 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. The stone outlasts the unit under it, whoever owns the flat.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Dense concrete and blockwork mean the wall cannot be chased back or packed out, so the stone carries the scribe. What that does to a vanity is push the whole job into a narrow depth, because a bathroom takes the same stone as a kitchen in about two thirds of the width. A cloakroom top and an en-suite top are one job at two sizes.

Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. A deep scribe comes out of the nest, so how far the stone has to be relieved changes which part of the slab the piece is cut from. 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. A pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Kitchens in this stock are compact and reasonably square, which makes the fixed lines a larger share of the total than the material is. 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. It is the smallest piece we cut and the most crowded.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Once a long piece is in on the diagonal there is no room left for anyone else, so it travels up alone and is met on the landing above. What the route really decides for a bathroom is the shelving and the window board, since long thin pieces are the ones that break when they are twisted round a turn. Offcut-sized pieces are the easiest stone in the trade to move.