Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Putney Vale

Yes. Putney Vale is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW15. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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 bathroom return visit is planned around the street, not the diary. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The chimney breast served a back boiler and is usually still standing, so there is a shallow recess on one side of the room. 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. Concrete walls take a bracket well and a chase badly. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A low window over the basin caps the splash return.

Whether the kitchen sits straight ahead or off a turn at the end of the hall changes the maximum piece far more than the hall width does. 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. Nothing is stood on edge once the tap holes are drilled. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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. Tap holes are drilled at the works, so nothing keeps the van waiting.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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 vanity tops off one slab run, or they will not match. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. An en-suite is the same four operations at a smaller size.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. 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 bathroom is drawn while the kitchen is still on the bench. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan. 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. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. 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. An en-suite in a let flat is specified like the bathroom next door.

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. Carcasses stay. Surface changes. That is the whole of it. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. The basin travels in the van with the top it belongs to.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. An inter-war terrace is wider than a Victorian one and shallower than a semi, so the kitchen is a compact square room rather than a galley. The original bathroom here is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against two walls, so both ends are scribed. A boxed riser in the corner is the usual obstacle upstairs.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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 scribe on a vanity is measured in depth it cannot spare.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Offcut stock is the cheapest stone a vanity will ever sit on.