Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Furzedown

Yes. Furzedown is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW17, SW16. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. A shared-use bay allows a paid stay up to a set maximum, and that maximum is routinely shorter than the working day the job needs. 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. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

There is usually a shared rear alley, and whether the gate onto it is unlocked decides whether long pieces come in from the back. 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. A large bathroom is where a double vanity becomes possible. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A shelf in a shower niche is scribed on three sides.

The front door is often the cheapest hundred millimetres on the route, because a door lifted off its hinges gives back the width its own thickness was taking. 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. Offcut-sized pieces are the easiest stone in the trade to move. Camera enforcement gives nobody the chance to explain, where an officer on foot at least sees a tail lift down and stone coming off it. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Ordered with the kitchen, the bathroom costs no extra journey.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop fabrication and worktop replacement. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of 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. Loft rooms bring an en-suite and a very tight flight. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. A repeated top is still drilled to the taps actually bought.

With three walls in play the chance of one of them being out of square is high, and the template has to carry all three angles. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The vanity comes off what the kitchen leaves behind. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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. A vanity has no depth to give away to a scribe. 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. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. A let bathroom wants quartz for the same reason a let kitchen does: nothing to seal, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be briefed on. Wall-hung units suit a bathroom somebody else cleans.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. The back door frequently opens straight into the kitchen, which is the best carry route in the house and the one people forget to mention. 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. The soil stack decides the basin position more than taste does.

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. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Two runs and a return into a rear extension is the pattern, and the return is the piece that never nests neatly on a slab. 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.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Original quarry-tiled floors sit lower than a later screed, so a run crossing that junction needs the units packed to one level. Half-tiled walls are the pattern in these houses, and the tile line is what a splash return has to meet, which is settled before the top is drawn rather than after. What the wall is made of decides how the unit is fixed.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. The advantage of a U is that every join can be put over a gable in a corner, so nothing lands in the middle of a clear length. 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. One slab run, so the bathroom matches the kitchen.