Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Shepherd's Bush

Yes. Shepherd's Bush is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W12. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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 shelves come in with the top so nobody returns for them. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A villa cut into flats leaves kitchens in rooms that were never kitchens, with services run to wherever they could physically be made to reach. 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. A boxed riser in the corner is the usual obstacle upstairs. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A basin cannot be moved to suit a wall that is out of true.

Weight tells on a staircase more than anywhere else, because there is nowhere to set a piece down mid-flight and no way to change your grip once it is moving. 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. The turn at the head of the stairs decides a double vanity. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A vanity delivery is minutes at the kerb, not hours.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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. Shared houses want quartz vanities and no sealing regime. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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. Where every bathroom matches, one slab covers the building.

Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. 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. Where the kitchen eats the slab, the bathroom buys its own. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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 waste position is fixed before the aperture is drawn. 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. The person choosing the surface is not the person who will cook on it, which argues for a finish that absorbs ordinary wear rather than one that rewards careful housekeeping. 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. The stone outlasts the unit under it, whoever owns the flat.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. 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. 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. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. 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. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. 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. One trip in with the top, the shelves and the adhesive.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. 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. Every flight adds a set of handling movements, and handling is where stone gets damaged, so a fourth-floor walk-up is priced by the flight rather than by the metre. 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. Offcut-sized pieces are the easiest stone in the trade to move.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. The flat entrance door and the internal doorways are usually tighter than the communal stairs, which is the opposite of what most people assume. Where a bedroom has been divided to make a bathroom the window sits off centre to the new room and the vanity ends up under it, which puts the window board in the order rather than outside it. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing.