Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Hayes

Yes. Hayes is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR2. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. 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 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. A second visit for a splash return is one we would rather avoid. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The kitchen is at the front or the back depending on the plan, and which it is decides whether there is a rear door on the route at all. 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. Deep reveals turn a window board into a real piece of stone. A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A low window over the basin caps the splash return.

Garden routes carry their own hazards: a drain cover, a step up to a patio, wet decking, or a lawn that will not take a loaded trolley. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. An en-suite off a bedroom adds a second flight, not a second job. 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. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Short jobs suffer most from a van that has to move.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. Shared houses want quartz vanities and no sealing regime. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. Where every bathroom matches, one slab covers the building.

A U shape uses more linear metres than people expect, and the two returns rarely nest together, so a second slab is a genuine possibility. 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. Two rooms, one batch, one delivery. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. 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. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan. Measure from the finished unit up to the underside of the window sill and send it with the basin and tap models. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. 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.

Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. A boiler hangs on the wall above the run in most of these, and its pipework drops exactly where a splashback wants to go. 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. Basin, tap holes and splash return inside a few hundred millimetres.

Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. A side gate hung to open outward against a fence post is narrower in use than it measures, and lifting the gate off its hinges is usually the quickest win on the route. What the route really decides for a bathroom is the shelving and the window board, since long thin pieces are the ones that break when they are twisted round a turn. The bath is usually in the way before the doorway is.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. 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. A vanity is nested last and cut from what is left.

Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Where the sill lands inside the height an upstand would occupy there is no upstand, and the stone either dies into the reveal or stops short of it. 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. The scribe on a vanity is measured in depth it cannot spare.