Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Brentham Garden Suburb

Yes. Brentham Garden Suburb is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W5. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Ealing. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. 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.

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. Concrete walls take a bracket well and a chase badly. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A sloping floor is corrected under the unit, not under the stone.

A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Nothing is stood on edge once the tap holes are drilled. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. 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 templating, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Several vanity tops off one slab run, or they will not match. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. An en-suite is the same four operations at a smaller size.

The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. 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. Two bathrooms nest better together than either does alone. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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 tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled. 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 void week is the easiest slot for a bathroom.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. A picture rail, a deep skirting and a moulded architrave all sit in the way of anything that assumes flat wall from floor to ceiling. 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.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. 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. The waste from a basin aperture is what a shelf is cut from.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. The carcasses stay. Only the surface changes. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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.

Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. A double vanity is a worktop as far as the carry is concerned.