Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Richmond Hill

Yes. Richmond Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW10. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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 plumber and the van rarely want the street on the same day. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. 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. Concrete walls take a bracket well and a chase badly. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one.

A steep pitch shortens the tread and lengthens the reach, which leaves whoever is below carrying most of the weight for the full flight. 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. Stone reaches a bathroom in one trip or it does not reach it. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. 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. Two pieces and a tube of sealant is the whole delivery.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. 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. 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.

A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. 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 vanity is nested last and cut from what is left. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. The bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats. 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. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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 void week is the easiest slot for a bathroom.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Where the kitchen eats the slab, the bathroom buys its own.

Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. On a drive that only takes one vehicle nose-in, the van has to reverse the whole length of it to get back out, which decides which way it goes 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. A booked window suits a bathroom better than it suits a kitchen.

Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. A narrow top nests into waste a kitchen cut list would otherwise throw away, which makes it the cheapest stone in the job. The thickness follows the kitchen unless you ask otherwise.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Where the stairwell is narrow enough that the stone travels on edge the polished face runs within an inch of the plaster, so the walls get boarded as well as the steps. 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 turn at the head of the stairs decides a double vanity.