Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Hampton

Yes. Hampton 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. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. 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 larder under the stairs is usually still there and still opens into the kitchen, so the run stops at a door that cannot be moved. The bathroom in one of these is almost never original: it is a later room over the back addition, or a bedroom divided in two. Deep reveals turn a window board into a real piece of stone. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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.

Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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 piece is carried by its long edges, never by the aperture. Where the drive is shared, the half-hour the van spends in the way is agreed with the neighbour in advance rather than apologised for at the time. 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. 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 design & quotation, 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. 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. A rear addition adds a cloakroom before it adds anything else. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Shared houses want quartz vanities and no sealing regime.

Island units are rarely fixed to anything at first fix, so they get screwed to the floor and levelled against the perimeter run before the stone is measured at all. 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. Small pieces are drawn onto the plan, never left to chance. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

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. 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. 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. Whoever chooses the tap is setting the hole spacing.

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. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. There is usually a step down into the back addition, so the kitchen floor and the hall floor are not the same level and neither of them is flat. 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. One piece, four operations, and nowhere for any of them to move.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Knee room under a breakfast bar is measured from the face of the cabinets rather than from the edge of the stone, so a deep apron quietly eats the depth somebody actually gets to sit in. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A slab bought for a bathroom alone is mostly unused, and priced so.

An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Three stools along one side need more clear length than most plans allow, and once the seating depth is fixed the piece either grows or it loses a seat. 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. The bathroom pieces are labelled on the nest before the saw runs.

Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. Where a side return has been infilled, the join between old brick and new blockwork lands mid-run and the two faces are never in one plane. 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. Concrete walls take a bracket well and a chase badly.