Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Eastcote

Yes. Eastcote is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA5, HA4. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hillingdon. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. 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 moves on. The fitter stays with the vanity. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Bungalow kitchens are frequently extended into the rear or opened into the roof space, so the room is part original and part new build. The original bathroom in these houses is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against a wall at each end, so both ends are scribed and there is no tolerance left between them. A boxed riser in the corner is the usual obstacle upstairs. A brick pier standing into the run divides it in two, and the join goes against the pier where a clear wall would have needed no join at all. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The waste position is fixed before the aperture is drawn.

Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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. Protection goes down the stairs as well as along the hall. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. 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. Ordered with the kitchen, the bathroom costs no extra journey.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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 is decided late and the offcut has usually gone. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. Batched vanity tops are templated in one visit.

On a book-matched pair the halves are laid out so the mirror line runs down the length of the piece, and once that line is set the top cannot be turned round to suit anything else. 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 veined vanity is nested for what shows above the basin. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where the structure cannot be cut into, the stone is relieved instead, and a relief that deep changes both the yield off the slab and how the piece is handled. 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. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one. 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. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. 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 specification repeated across flats is drawn once.

Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. A bathroom return visit is planned around the street, not the diary.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Wide doorways and level thresholds mean full-length pieces go in whole and the join count comes down to slab length alone. 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. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Rear extensions on these sit on shallow foundations, and the crack at the junction with the original wall tells you which way it has moved. 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 depth sets the piece, not the length of the wall.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. 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. Two bathrooms nest better together than either does alone.