Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Hanger Hill

Yes. Hanger Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W5. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Ealing. Some zones are controlled for a short window in the middle of the day and open either side of it, which makes the timing of the visit the whole question. 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. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Arts and Crafts houses have deep eaves, low windows and inglenook recesses, so the kitchen has more corners and reveals than its floor area suggests. 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 honest measure: it is nested like one, carried like one and priced like one. High ceilings do nothing for a vanity, but the reveals do. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The unit is packed level before the top goes near it.

A fitted stair carpet is either lifted or covered, because grit trodden into it under work boots does more harm than the carry itself. 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. A suspension only works if the cones and the notice are actually there on the morning, and now and then a car is sitting in the bay regardless. 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 bathroom return visit is planned around the street, not the diary.

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. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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.

One leg of an L is nearly always the working run and the other little more than a landing space, but both are templated, cut and edged to the same standard. 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, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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. A boxed soil stack takes depth from where the basin wants 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. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. 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 vanity is small enough to be the one indulgence in a bathroom.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. 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. Wall-hung means the wall carries the basin, so the wall gets checked.

Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. Where the floor falls away the unit is packed level first, because a top that follows a sloping floor announces it against the tile joints behind. The tile joint behind is what shows a top that is not level.

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. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. The units below stay exactly as they are; only the surface is replaced. Where the permit is a digital session rather than a paper one, somebody in the house has to start it at the hour the van actually arrives. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. Tap holes are drilled at the works, so nothing keeps the van waiting.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. 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.