Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Wimbledon Chase

Yes. Wimbledon Chase is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW20, SW19. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. 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 bathroom slot is booked short and kept short. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

Where the roof has been converted there is usually a steel over the kitchen that went in after the walls, and the run beneath it is worth checking for square. 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. A rear addition bathroom is cold, narrow and full of pipework. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. What is behind the plaster decides how a vanity is fixed.

A hall radiator or a coat hook at shoulder height takes a hundred millimetres off the usable width, and a hundred millimetres is often the entire margin. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Loft en-suites arrive up the tightest flight in the house. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Everything the bathroom needs comes off the van at once.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop replacement. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. 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. 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. A rear addition adds a cloakroom before it adds anything else. 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. Shared houses want quartz vanities and no sealing regime.

The advantage of a U is that every join can be put over a gable in a corner, so nothing lands in the middle of a clear length. 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. Two bathrooms nest better together than either does alone. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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 top follows the unit, and the unit follows a level. 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. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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.

Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. 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. Where every bathroom matches, one slab covers the building.

An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Where the hall runs straight through to the back the piece can be walked in flat, and it is only the two door frames that have to be cleared. 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. The piece is carried by its long edges, never by the aperture.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. The kitchen sits at the back with a door to the garden and a window over the sink, and both are on the wall the run wants. Half-tiled walls are the norm, and the tile line is what the splash return has to meet, which is a decision taken before machining rather than discovered afterwards. Older walls give a vanity nothing straight to sit against.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. The short run at the head of a U usually sits under a window, so that piece is scribed on three sides at once and has nowhere left to be pushed back to. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The waste from a basin aperture is what a shelf is cut from.