Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Gunnersbury

Yes. Gunnersbury is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W4, TW8. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hounslow. Time-limited bays are camera-enforced across a lot of managed estates, so the unload runs to the clock and the van moves off afterwards. 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. Short jobs suffer most from a van that has to move. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Inter-war purpose-built blocks have curved external walls and steel windows, so a run along an outside wall is following a genuine curve rather than a bow. A bathroom in a block like this was usually carved out of a larger room, so the proportions are odd, the ceiling is high and the window reveals are deep enough to be worth cutting in stone. A pod bathroom inside a shell has walls built last week. 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. 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.

A car will often hold more than its doors will admit, and it is the clear width between the door edges that a piece actually has to pass through. 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. Long thin shelves break on the turn, not on the road. A dedicated loading bay or service yard is the easiest arrangement in a managed building, provided the slot is booked and someone has the key to the shutter. 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. The whole bathroom fits on a trolley in one load.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. 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. Repeat bathrooms come cheaper per top, not per square metre. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. 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 converted house needs a vanity on every floor.

Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. 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 slab bought for a bathroom alone is mostly unused, and priced so. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted 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. 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. The unit is packed level before the top goes near it. Confirm the block working hours and any porter sign-in, and have the plumber agree the waste position before we template. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. 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. Honed stone in a bathroom asks more of whoever cleans it.

The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. A wall-hung unit puts the whole weight into the wall rather than onto the floor, so what the wall is built of stops being a detail. A boxed soil stack takes depth from where the basin wants it.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The communal stair is stone with a cast iron balustrade, and the winders leave very little room to turn a long piece. 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. Nothing about a vanity is standard except the depth of the unit.

A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. These blocks were built with a lift from new, which will usually take a worktop and almost never takes a full-length island piece. Walls are thick, old and out of true, which means the vanity is scribed at both ends and the splash return is cut to follow the wall rather than to a straight line. The window over the basin is the one the top answers to.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. 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. A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The bathroom pieces are labelled on the nest before the saw runs.