Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Strawberry Hill

Yes. Strawberry Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW1, TW2. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The shelves come in with the top so nobody returns for them. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Air bricks that once ventilated the original floor now open into the extension, and one of them is generally sitting behind a base unit. The original bathroom in these houses is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against a wall at each end, so both ends are scribed and there is no tolerance left between them. Boarded floors give, and a vanity shows it at the tile line. 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. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one.

Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. 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 staircase is the last stage of every bathroom carry. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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. A vanity delivery is minutes at the kerb, not hours.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop templating and worktop installation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. An annexe kitchen is often built to keep a parent independent, so worktop height and reach matter as much as the material does. 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. Repeat work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought. A family adding a self-contained unit is paying for the whole conversion, and the worktop is one line in a much longer job. 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. Several small tops nest better than one large one.

An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A vanity is nested last and cut from what is left. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

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. Half-tiled walls leave a line the top has to meet. 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. 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. Marble on a vanity marks, and that is said before it is cut.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. 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. 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. One trip in with the top, the shelves and the adhesive.

A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. A loading bay or a red route puts a clock on the unload, so the pieces come off in the order they will be fitted rather than the order they were loaded. 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. A cut top is weaker than an uncut one, so it travels differently.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The rear extension is usually the newest and truest part of the building, so it is the older half of the kitchen that gives the trouble. 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. Small enough to carry, awkward enough to plan.

How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. The workmanship guarantee is the same either way. It does not extend to a material we did not supply. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Where several adults share the cooking the kitchen is in use most of the day, so a fitting slot has to be agreed with more people than usual. It usually means the bathroom is decided late, after the kitchen, and by then the offcut that would have suited it has gone. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme.