Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Hampton Hill

Yes. Hampton Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW12. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. A step up from the drive to the threshold turns the last two metres into a lift, and a lift is where two pairs of hands become the minimum. 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 basin travels in the van with the top it belongs to. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The structure below is commercial, so the floor is often timber over a shop ceiling and the load path under an island is worth thinking about. The bathroom is the small room over the kitchen, and the waste already runs where it needs to, so the basin position is more or less settled before anyone draws anything. Old pipework is boxed rather than moved, and the top notches round it. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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.

The measurement that decides everything is the diagonal between the underside of the flight above and the outer edge of the turn below 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. Protection goes down the stairs as well as along the hall. Where the van cannot turn on the plot it has to arrive already facing the right way, so the approach along the street is part of the plan. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A second visit for a splash return is one we would rather avoid.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. 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. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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. Small tops are where a slab finally gets fully used. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. 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. The vanity is the piece that makes a converted flat read finished.

Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across 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. A slab bought for a bathroom alone is mostly unused, and priced so. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

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. 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. Measure from the finished unit up to the underside of the window sill and send it with the basin and tap models. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. 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. Whoever chooses the tap is setting the hole spacing.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Small, roughly square kitchens with a back door and a window in the middle of the run: short lengths, few joins, and a lot to work around. 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. Most vanity tops begin life as an offcut from another room.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The units below stay exactly as they are; only the surface is replaced. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. 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. Short jobs suffer most from a van that has to move.

If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. Half-tiled walls leave a line the top has to meet.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Corner sinks and corner hobs sit exactly where the joint wants to be, so on an L the cut-out positions get settled before the join positions do. 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.