Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Bromley Common

Yes. Bromley Common is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR2. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. 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 van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The back door frequently opens straight into the kitchen, which is the best carry route in the house and the one people forget to mention. 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. Where the floor is solid, the unit sits where it is put. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one.

A front path with a gate and a turn or two adds handling before the door is even reached, and every handling movement is another chance to catch a corner. 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. Small pieces still get crated, because small pieces get dropped. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A bathroom slot is booked short and kept short.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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. 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. 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. 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. An en-suite is the same four operations at a smaller size.

The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. 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. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

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. The bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats. 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. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. 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.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. A wall-hung unit puts the whole weight into the wall rather than onto the floor, so what the wall is built of stops being a detail. A wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone.

A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. A carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. The way into a bathroom ends at a door that opens inward.

Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Carcasses stay. Surface changes. That is the whole of it. Where the drive is shared, the half-hour the van spends in the way is agreed with the neighbour in advance rather than apologised for at the time. 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. Everything the bathroom needs comes off the van at once.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. 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. The waste from a basin aperture is what a shelf is cut from.