Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Farnborough

Yes. Farnborough is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR6. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. 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 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. Ordered with the kitchen, the bathroom costs no extra journey. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Doorways are low and narrow, which is a genuine constraint on piece length before anything else is considered. A freestanding bath in the middle of the room pushes the vanity to a wall and often under a window, so the window board is drawn with the top rather than added later from a second offcut. Loft en-suites lose their splash return to the slope. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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.

Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. 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. 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 van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A bathroom return visit is planned around the street, not the diary.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. 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. 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. Batched vanity tops are templated in one visit. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. Two basins in one room is one piece, not two.

A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind 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. The bathroom pieces are labelled on the nest before the saw runs. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. Where the wall bows, the splash return is scribed to follow it. Send the unit layout for every bathroom at once with the basin and tap models against each, so the slab can be nested for all of them. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. 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.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. A loading bay or a red route puts a clock on the unload, so the pieces come off in the order they will be fitted rather than the order they were loaded. 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 vanity top is lifted once and set down once.

It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Lime plaster over rubble moves in and out enough that a single long panel will show a gap somewhere along its length. Bathrooms in houses this size are big enough for a double vanity, and a top with two basins and several tap holes is a worktop by any other measure. Where the floor is solid, the unit sits where it is put.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. 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. The kitchen is nearly always in a later rear or side extension, so half the room is a century older than the other half and the two meet mid-run. 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. We seat the basin. Your plumber connects it.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. A steel goes in where the original back wall came out, and the ceiling steps down under it at the point the run passes beneath. 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. A bathroom top is drawn from the fitted unit, never from a plan.