Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Hillingdon

Yes. Hillingdon is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are UB10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of the borough. 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. Short jobs suffer most from a van that has to move. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The rear wall now carries french or folding doors across most of its width, so a whole side of the room opens and a long piece comes straight in off the garden. The original bathroom in these houses is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against a wall at each end, so both ends are scribed and there is no tolerance left between them. Where the floor is solid, the unit sits where it is put. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The tile joint behind is what shows a top that is not level.

The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. 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. Small pieces still get crated, because small pieces get dropped. 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. 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 installation, worktop replacement and worktop fabrication. 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. Rooms in a shared house are let individually, so the work has to be done around whoever is still living in the building. 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. A landlord ordering several kitchens at once is buying a specification once and then repeating it, so the early decisions are worth taking slowly. 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.

The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. 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. The vanity comes off what the kitchen leaves behind. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its 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. A stud wall takes a vanity only once there is timber behind it. Settle the tiling height and the basin model first, and let us know whether the unit is standing on the floor or hanging off the wall. 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. Whoever chooses the tap is setting the hole spacing.

The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. 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 way into a bathroom ends at a door that opens inward.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. One slab run, so the bathroom matches the kitchen.

Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. Nothing in a bathroom is square, and the top has to be.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. The room is wide enough that an island turns up in nearly every scheme, and how far the drainage can be taken is what fixes where it sits. Half-tiled walls are the norm, and the tile line is what the splash return has to meet, which is a decision taken before machining rather than discovered afterwards. An original bathroom is usually the smallest room upstairs.