Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Notting Hill

Yes. Notting Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W11. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. No basin aperture is worth rushing for a parking bay. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A semi has a side passage, and whether it is wide enough to carry a piece flat and turn it in at the back door is the first thing worth measuring. The bathroom in one of these is almost never original: it is a later room over the back addition, or a bedroom divided in two. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing. Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled.

Two people will walk a two-metre piece in through a front door; the same hall with a three-metre piece wants four, purely because nobody can let go halfway. 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. Long thin shelves break on the turn, not on the road. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. 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 bathroom pieces come off last and go in first.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as 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 second bathroom is worth ordering with the first. 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. A house divided into flats needs a vanity for each of them, and small repeated pieces are the one case where buying a whole slab makes sense. Small tops are where a slab finally gets fully used.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. 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. Offcut stock is the cheapest stone a vanity will ever sit on. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. 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 pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one. 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. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. 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.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. No money is taken before the template happens. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Gas, waste and later wiring were boxed in against the wall long after the house was built, and that boxing is what the run has to clear. 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. It is the smallest piece we cut and the most crowded.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Building management is often the real gate rather than the bay itself, since the barrier, the shutter and the lift each need someone with a fob. 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. A vanity fit ends before most parking restrictions do.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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. The bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. The front door is often the cheapest hundred millimetres on the route, because a door lifted off its hinges gives back the width its own thickness was taking. 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 window board is the piece that catches a door frame.