Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Avery Hill

Yes. Avery Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE9. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. 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 vanity delivery is minutes at the kerb, not hours. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The skim over dense block is thin and dishes out round a hole, so a fixing wants a hammer drill and the dust travels through the flat. Bathrooms in this stock are compact, squarely built and take a short vanity that will come out of almost any offcut, which makes them among the cheapest bathroom tops we cut. A pod bathroom inside a shell has walls built last week. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A sloping floor is corrected under the unit, not under the stone.

A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. 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. A cut top is weaker than an uncut one, so it travels differently. 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. One trip in with the top, the shelves and the adhesive.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. 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. One drawing per bathroom, however alike they look. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. 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. Ordered later, the batch match is a gamble rather than a plan. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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. The tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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 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. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The carry is the constraint: a single stair with tight half-landings, or deck access with a long walk from the lift. 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 tap decides the drilling, so the tap is settled first.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Long thin shelves break on the turn, not on the road.

Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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. A pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Windows sit high and the sill line crosses the middle of the run, which limits what can go above the worktop. 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. A vanity is where an expensive slab stops being expensive.