Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in West Putney

Yes. West Putney 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. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. 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 booked window suits a bathroom better than it suits a kitchen. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Floors are boards over joists with a solid floor only in the service rooms, and the two meet somewhere in the middle of the kitchen. Bathrooms in houses this size are big enough for a double vanity, and a top with two basins and several tap holes is a worktop by any honest measure: it is nested like one, carried like one and priced like one. A rear addition bathroom is cold, narrow and full of pipework. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan.

Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. 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. Carried flat on a board once the aperture has been cut. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. 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.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop templating and worktop installation. 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. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. Several small tops nest better than one large one. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme.

On a book-matched pair the halves are laid out so the mirror line runs down the length of the piece, and once that line is set the top cannot be turned round to suit anything else. 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 double vanity is nested like a worktop, not like an offcut. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. Send the unit layout for every bathroom at once with the basin and tap models against each, so the slab can be nested for all of them. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. 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. Access to a tenanted bathroom is arranged, not assumed.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The kitchen is nearly always in a later rear or side extension, so half the room is a century older than the other half and the two meet mid-run. 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. The stone is the simple half of a bathroom fit.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. Where the kitchen swallows the whole slab there is no offcut worth having, and the vanity then has to be priced against material bought for itself. Shelves and a window board come out of the same corner of the slab.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. 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.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. A steel goes in where the original back wall came out, and the ceiling steps down under it at the point the run passes beneath. A vanity top is where all of that turns up in miniature, with the basin, the tap holes and a splash return crowded into a few hundred millimetres of stone. Nothing about a vanity is standard except the depth of the unit.