Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Eel Pie Island

Yes. Eel Pie Island is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW1. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. 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 whole bathroom fits on a trolley in one load. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The original larder or store cupboard usually survives in a corner, and that alcove is deeper than the units and squarer than the walls around it. 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. A pod bathroom inside a shell has walls built last week. Dot-and-dab plasterboard sounds solid and is hollow behind, so anything fixed through it has to hit a dab or a batten rather than a void. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A cloakroom under a stair slope limits the tap before the top.

Where the turn inside is tight the piece gets turned on the path and brought in already on edge, which needs room in front of the door as well as behind it. 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. Stone reaches a bathroom in one trip or it does not reach it. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A bay for twenty minutes is enough for a vanity.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication, worktop templating and worktop installation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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.

Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A veined vanity is nested for what shows above the basin. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Taped internal angles in plasterboard belly at the corner, so the run picks up a few millimetres over the last 300mm and a plan-angle mitre will not close. 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. What is behind the plaster decides how a vanity is fixed. 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. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. 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. Wall-hung units suit a bathroom somebody else cleans.

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. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Sash windows sit low in the rear wall, and the sill often lands below the height a worktop wants to run past. 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. Basin, tap holes and splash return inside a few hundred millimetres.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Everything comes through the front door and down the hall, so the tightest point on the route is usually the newel post at the foot of the stairs. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. The turn at the head of the stairs decides a double vanity.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. 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.

Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. A narrow entrance hall with a turn into the back of the house caps the longest piece we can physically get in, whatever the run itself measures. 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. Offcut-sized pieces are the easiest stone in the trade to move.