Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Bushey Mead

Yes. Bushey Mead is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW20. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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. We arrive with the offcut pieces already labelled by room. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The original room is timber over a ventilated void and the newer half is a slab, so the floor gives underfoot on one side of the junction and not on the other. Half-tiled walls are the norm, and the tile line is what the splash return has to meet, which is a decision taken before machining rather than discovered afterwards. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return has to meet. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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. Half-tiled walls leave a line the top has to meet.

Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. 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. The staircase is the last stage of every bathroom carry. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. An en-suite and a family bathroom come off the same load.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as 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. An en-suite is the same four operations at a smaller size. 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. One tap across a building means one drilling setup.

A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. 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 runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear 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. A cloakroom under a stair slope limits the tap before the top. Settle the tiling height and the basin model first, and let us know whether the unit is standing on the floor or hanging off the wall. Owner-occupied kitchens are usually being done once, which is why the edge profile, the vein direction and where a join falls are worth the conversation. 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 lead time on a vanity is the lead time on a kitchen.

Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. 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. 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. Cloakrooms are the piece most often forgotten at ordering.

An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. 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 cut top is weaker than an uncut one, so it travels differently.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Plaster in the older half is a sand and cement backing on brick while the newer half is board on dabs, so the same fixing bites in one wall and breaks through the other. The original bathroom here is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against two walls, so both ends are scribed. A separate WC becomes a cloakroom with a very small top.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. A downdraught extractor takes a long slot out of the middle of the piece and a motor housing out of the cabinet below it, so what sits under the top is settled before anything is cut. 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. Yield is why a vanity in a rare stone is still affordable.