Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Bishop's Park

Yes. Bishop's Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW6. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. Streets near a ground or a venue have restrictions that come and go with the fixture list rather than with the time of day. 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 van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The step down from the main house into the addition is commonly a hundred to a hundred and fifty millimetres, which gives the kitchen a different floor datum from the rest of the ground floor. 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. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A shelf in a shower niche is scribed on three sides.

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. 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. Small pieces still get crated, because small pieces get dropped. On an event day the controls are wider, tighter and enforced harder than the signage suggests on any other morning of the week. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A bathroom slot is booked short and kept short.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. Small tops are where a slab finally gets fully used. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. The vanity is the piece that makes a converted flat read finished.

A peninsula is an island with one end tied to a run, which means the join between them has to be planned rather than allowed to happen. 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 thickness follows the kitchen unless you ask otherwise. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. 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 vanity has no depth to give away to a scribe. 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. 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. Whoever signs it off is whoever chooses the basin.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. A hundred and forty years of alterations sit under the current kitchen, and the worktop is what has to sit flat on top of all of it. 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 vanity top is a small piece with a great deal drilled through it.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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 unit is packed level before the top goes near it.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. The practical answer is to check the fixture list before the date is offered, because a template slot lost to a road closure cannot be recovered that week. 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. Everything the bathroom needs comes off the van at once.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. The free end is what needs deciding early: square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall to the floor, and a waterfall is cut in sequence off the same part of the slab. Where the kitchen swallows the whole slab there is no offcut worth having, and the vanity then has to be priced against material bought for itself. A double vanity is nested like a worktop, not like an offcut.