Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Peterborough Estate

Yes. Peterborough Estate 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 van waiting on a loading concession has somebody standing with it, because a vehicle left unattended is the one that collects the ticket. 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 bay for twenty minutes is enough for a vanity. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

The rear door swings inward across the end of the run, so the last few hundred millimetres of worktop are only reachable with the door shut. 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. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return has to meet. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats.

Sintered stone at 12mm changes what a staircase can take, because the same run arrives at roughly half the weight of the granite equivalent. 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. A splash return travels with the top it belongs to. Controlled hours that end in the middle of the afternoon make the second half of the day easy and put the whole problem in the first half. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. We arrive with the offcut pieces already labelled by room.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, 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. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. Small tops are where a slab finally gets fully used. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. The vanity is the piece that makes a converted flat read finished.

Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. 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. A narrow top nests into waste nobody else wants. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. 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 wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone. 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. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. A let bathroom wants quartz for the same reason a let kitchen does: nothing to seal, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be briefed on. The stone outlasts the unit under it, whoever owns the flat.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. 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. An en-suite and a family bathroom come off the same load.

Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. A piece carried on edge up a flight has to clear the ceiling above the stairs as well as the walls either side of it. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Stone reaches a bathroom in one trip or it does not reach it.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Corner sinks and corner hobs sit exactly where the joint wants to be, so on an L the cut-out positions get settled before the join positions do. 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. The bathroom is drawn while the kitchen is still on the bench.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. A picture rail, a deep skirting and a moulded architrave all sit in the way of anything that assumes flat wall from floor to ceiling. 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. The tap decides the drilling, so the tap is settled first.