Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Chiswick

Yes. Chiswick is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W4. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hounslow. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. 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 bathroom return visit is planned around the street, not the diary. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The addition is one room wide, so the run is a galley with a door at one end and a window at the other and no wall long enough for anything else. 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. Deep reveals turn a window board into a real piece of stone. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone.

A step up off the pavement means the piece is lifted to the threshold before it is carried anywhere, and that first lift is the one that wants four hands. 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 splash return travels with the top it belongs to. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Tap holes are drilled at the works, so nothing keeps the van waiting.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop design & quotation. 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 converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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. Repeat work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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. Several small tops nest better than one large one.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. 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 waste from a basin aperture is what a shelf is cut from. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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. Where the wall bows, the splash return is scribed to follow it. 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. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. 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. Owner bathrooms get the slab viewed; let ones get the sample.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Injected damp courses and re-rendered lower walls leave the bottom metre standing proud of everything above 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. The same stone as the kitchen, in a narrower cut.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. 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. Small pieces are drawn onto the plan, never left to chance.

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. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Where the walls have been dry-lined over the old lath there is a void behind the board and no solid fixing until a batten is found. 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. Most vanity tops begin life as an offcut from another room.

If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. 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. 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.