Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Brixton

Yes. Brixton is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW9, SW2. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Tap holes are drilled at the works, so nothing keeps the van waiting. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The bay at the front and the back addition at the rear were built to different standards, and the kitchen is nearly always in the weaker of the two. Either way the walls are thin, the floor is boards over shallow joists and nothing meets at a right angle, so the vanity is scribed at both ends and the unit is fixed back to the wall as well as standing on the floor. The bathroom in a house like this is rarely where it started. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. A sloping floor is corrected under the unit, not under the stone.

Handrails, mirrors and a sloping ceiling panel all eat into the usable diagonal, and none of them appear on a lift specification sheet. 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 vanity top goes wherever a person will go. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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. The basin travels in the van with the top it belongs to.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. An en-suite is the same four operations at a smaller size.

A peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. 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. Shelves and a window board come out of the same corner of the slab. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

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 tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled. 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. Access is arranged through a managing agent or a scheme office rather than with the household directly, so a date gets confirmed once in writing and moving it costs a fortnight. 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. Durability wins in a let bathroom, and it should.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. A bay-fronted terrace has a long hall running past the stairs to the kitchen, so the hall turn caps the piece length before the run length does. The bathroom in one of these is usually a later addition over the back kitchen, so the walls are thinner, the floor moves and a vanity has to sit level in a room that is not. Boarded floors give, and a vanity shows it at the tile line.

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 design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Lower ground floor kitchens are reached by a stair with a winder in it, and the head height over that winder is lower than the room at either end. 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. A vanity top is a small piece with a great deal drilled through it.

A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. A cast iron soil stack runs down the outside of the rear wall, so moving the sink means a fresh penetration through solid brick. 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. The depth sets the piece, not the length of the wall.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. The rear wall is usually a single brick thick and has been rendered, patched and re-rendered, so it bows in and out along the length of the run. Where a bedroom has been divided to make a bathroom the window sits off centre to the new room and the vanity ends up under it, which puts the window board in the order rather than outside it. A rear addition bathroom is cold, narrow and full of pipework.