Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Blackheath

Yes. Blackheath is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE3. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. Loading concessions differ from one zone to the next rather than following a single national rule, so what applied on the last job proves nothing about this one. 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. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The closet wing is a narrow projection at the back with windows on two sides, which leaves very little continuous wall for a run. 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. Where the floor is solid, the unit sits where it is put. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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 scribe on a vanity is measured in depth it cannot spare.

Where the stairwell is narrow enough that the stone travels on edge the polished face runs within an inch of the plaster, so the walls get boarded as well as the steps. 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. A van waiting on a loading concession has somebody standing with it, because a vehicle left unattended is the one that collects the ticket. 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. One trip in with the top, the shelves and the adhesive.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop replacement. 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. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. The vanity is the piece that makes a converted flat read finished. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. Several vanity tops off one slab run, or they will not match.

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. 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 veined vanity is nested for what shows above the basin. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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 sloping floor is corrected under the unit, not under the stone. 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. A void week is the easiest slot for a bathroom.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. 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 bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Two bathrooms nest better together than either does alone.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. 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. Controlled hours that end in the middle of the afternoon make the second half of the day easy and put the whole problem in the first half. 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. The van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does.

A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. 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 waste from a basin aperture is what a shelf is cut from.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that corner. 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.