Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Tooting Bec

Yes. Tooting Bec is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW17. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. 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 fit ends before most parking restrictions do. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Edwardian terraces are wider and taller than the Victorian houses next to them, so the kitchen usually takes a full-width rear room rather than a narrow outrigger. 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. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Nothing in a bathroom is square, and the top has to be.

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. The bath is usually in the way before the doorway is. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. 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. The plumber and the van rarely want the street on the same day.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. Batched vanity tops are templated in one visit. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. Two basins in one room is one piece, not two.

It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. 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.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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 low window over the basin caps the splash return. 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. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. 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. Wall-hung units suit a bathroom somebody else cleans.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Nothing in a house of this age is square, and the kitchen is usually the part that has been altered most often. 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. A bathroom top is drawn from the fitted unit, never from a plan.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. Boxed-in pipework running along the skirting looks harmless until a loaded trolley has to pass 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. Protection goes down the stairs as well as along the hall.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. A suspension is charged by the bay and by the day, so the number of metres asked for is worth getting right the first time. 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. Two pieces and a tube of sealant is the whole delivery.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The thickness follows the kitchen unless you ask otherwise.