Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Addington

Yes. Addington is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. Where the van cannot turn on the plot it has to arrive already facing the right way, so the approach along the street is part of the plan. 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. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The kitchen is at the front or the back depending on the plan, and which it is decides whether there is a rear door on the route at all. The bathroom is the small room over the kitchen, and the waste already runs where it needs to, so the basin position is more or less settled before anyone draws anything. The window over the basin is the one the top answers to. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A cloakroom under a stair slope limits the tap before the top.

A narrow entrance hall with a turn into the back of the house caps the longest piece we can physically get in, whatever the run itself measures. 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 piece is carried by its long edges, never by the aperture. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. 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 particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop design & quotation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. A family adding a self-contained unit is paying for the whole conversion, and the worktop is one line in a much longer job. 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. One drawing per bathroom, however alike they look. 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. 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. A second bathroom is worth ordering with the first.

A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Ordered later, the batch match is a gamble rather than a plan. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. 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. What is behind the plaster decides how a vanity is fixed. Measure from the finished unit up to the underside of the window sill and send it with the basin and tap models. 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. 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. A vanity is small enough to be the one indulgence in a bathroom.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. 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. 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.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. 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. The offcut decides the colour more often than the brochure does.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. These were built on a solid ground floor slab, so nothing bounces and nothing can be packed down, only up. Windows sit low over the basin in these houses, and that window caps the height of any splash return before the rest of the room is even considered. Loft en-suites lose their splash return to the slope.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. 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. A narrow top nests into waste a kitchen cut list would otherwise throw away, which makes it the cheapest stone in the job. A veined vanity is nested for what shows above the basin.