Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Camberwell

Yes. Camberwell is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE5. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. 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. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The outrigger shares a party wall with the addition next door for its whole length, so one long side of the kitchen is solid brick with another kitchen on the far side of it. 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. A bathroom carved out of a bedroom keeps the bedroom window. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats.

Suction lifters earn their keep on a straight flight and become a liability on a winder, where a handle standing out from the face is one more thing to catch on a wall. 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. Long thin shelves break on the turn, not on the road. A permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole morning. 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. Everything the bathroom needs comes off the van at once.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. 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. 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. An en-suite is the same four operations at a smaller size. 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. One tap across a building means one drilling setup.

Waterfall ends are cut in sequence off the length either side of the top so the vein carries down the leg, and that sequence is gone the moment a piece has to be recut. 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 slab bought for a bathroom alone is mostly unused, and priced so. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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 wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold 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. Managed stock usually comes with its own rules about working hours, waste, and who is allowed on site. 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. Wall-hung units suit a bathroom somebody else cleans.

Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Where the walls have been dry-lined over the old lath there is a void behind the board and no solid fixing until a batten is found. 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 same stone as the kitchen, in a narrower cut.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Everything on an island is fed from underneath, extraction, a socket run, a hob and sometimes a waste, and each of them wants its hole before the top is bonded down. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The bathroom pieces are labelled on the nest before the saw runs.

Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. A soil stack is strapped to the outside of the addition wall and its branch comes through low, which settles where the sink can go before any layout is drawn. 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. Deep reveals turn a window board into a real piece of stone.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. The original scullery gully is still live in the yard outside the back door, and new waste from the sink joins a drain laid for a copper and a stone sink. 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. Concrete walls take a bracket well and a chase badly.