Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Kingston Hill

Yes. Kingston Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are KT2. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Kingston upon Thames. A shared drive is only useful if the neighbour is not the one parked behind the van, so we ask which side the standing belongs to before the date is set. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A bay for twenty minutes is enough for a vanity. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

These houses usually sit in their own grounds with a long approach, so the carry from van to door is longer than anything inside the building. A freestanding bath in the middle of the room pushes the vanity to a wall and often under a window, so the window board is drawn with the top rather than added later from a second offcut. Loft en-suites lose their splash return to the slope. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A stud wall takes a vanity only once there is timber behind it.

A front path with a gate and a turn or two adds handling before the door is even reached, and every handling movement is another chance to catch a corner. 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. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. 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. We arrive with the offcut pieces already labelled by room.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, 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. 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. Repeat work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought. 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. Several small tops nest better than one large one.

Everything on an island is fed from underneath, extraction, a socket run, a hob and sometimes a waste, and each of them wants its hole before the top is bonded down. 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. What the kitchen cannot use, the vanity usually can. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

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. 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. Nothing in a bathroom is square, and the top has to be. 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. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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. Nothing in a vanity quote is bundled into the kitchen.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Deep skirtings, a dado and a picture rail survive in the original rooms, so nothing sits flat to the wall without being cut around first. 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 visit, sitting between two plumbing visits.

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. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The room has three or four doors and a route through it to the garden, so the work shares the space with everyone else in the house. None of it changes the material, but it does decide whether the top comes out of offcut stock or wants a slab bought for it alone. A window reveal in a bathroom is stone as much as the vanity is.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. 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. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. One template visit covers both rooms if both are ready.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. A carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. 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. Two hands to a shelf, four to a double vanity.