Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Hurlingham

Yes. Hurlingham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW6. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. 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 whole bathroom fits on a trolley in one load. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Half-landings mean the back of the house sits at a slightly different level from the front, and a knocked-through kitchen crosses that line. 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. An original bathroom is usually the smallest room upstairs. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Half-tiled walls leave a line the top has to meet.

Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. 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. Carried flat on a board once the aperture has been cut. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. 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 bay for twenty minutes is enough for a vanity.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. 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. A landlord specifying once is specifying tap holes once. 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. En-suites and family bathrooms rarely take the same depth.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. 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. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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 cloakroom under a stair slope limits the tap before the top. 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. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. 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. Keys, dates and the basin should sit with the same person.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. A cast iron soil stack runs down the outside of the rear wall, so moving the sink means a fresh penetration through solid brick. 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. Cut for the basin you bought, not for a standard one.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. 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 carcasses stay. Only the surface changes. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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. We arrive with the offcut pieces already labelled by room.

Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. The original larder or store cupboard usually survives in a corner, and that alcove is deeper than the units and squarer than the walls around it. The bathroom in one of these is usually a later addition over the back kitchen, so the walls are thinner, the floor moves and a vanity has to sit level in a room that is not. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return 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 finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. 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. What the kitchen cannot use, the vanity usually can.