Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Catford

Yes. Catford is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE6. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. 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 moves on. The fitter stays with the vanity. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

A top-floor conversion puts part of the kitchen under the slope of the roof, so the wall behind the run stops at head height along one side of the room. 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. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return has to meet. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled.

Sintered stone at 12mm changes what a staircase can take, because the same run arrives at roughly half the weight of the granite equivalent. 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. Nothing is stood on edge once the tap holes are drilled. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. 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. Ordered with the kitchen, the bathroom costs no extra journey.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. 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. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. 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. En-suites and family bathrooms rarely take the same depth. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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. Repeat work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought.

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. The waste from a basin aperture is what a shelf is cut from. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. 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 pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one. 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. These kitchens tend to be compact and reasonably square, so the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines are a larger share of the total than the stone is. 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. The stone outlasts the unit under it, whoever owns the flat.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. 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. Small pieces are drawn onto the plan, never left to chance.

Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. The flat below hears the floor more than the walls, so lifting boards to move a waste run is a conversation with a neighbour before it is a morning of work. 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. A separate WC becomes a cloakroom with a very small top.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. Building management is often the real gate rather than the bay itself, since the barrier, the shutter and the lift each need someone with a fob. 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. A bathroom return visit is planned around the street, not the diary.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A piece carried on edge up a flight has to clear the ceiling above the stairs as well as the walls either side of it. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. A double vanity is a worktop as far as the carry is concerned.