Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Cheam

Yes. Cheam is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SM2, SM3. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Sutton. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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. A bathroom slot is booked short and kept short. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

The external wall on the passage side has never been rendered, so it is cold, solid and honest to fix into. 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 rear addition bathroom is cold, narrow and full of pipework. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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.

A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. 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. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. 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.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. 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. A second kitchen or a kitchenette in an annexe is a small job with the same fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines as a large one. 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. Where an annexe has been built or converted, its floor and its walls are newer than the main house and behave differently under the same run. 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.

Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. 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. Yield is why a vanity in a rare stone is still affordable. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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. 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. An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. 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 lead time on a vanity is the lead time on a kitchen.

An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. What the route really decides for a bathroom is the shelving and the window board, since long thin pieces are the ones that break when they are twisted round a turn. The landing turn matters more than the front door for a bathroom.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. A pop-up socket in the surface is one more cut-out through the full thickness, and it wants the same clear space beneath it that a sink does. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Ordered later, the batch match is a gamble rather than a plan.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. The larder under the stairs is usually still there and still opens into the kitchen, so the run stops at a door that cannot be moved. 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. Older walls give a vanity nothing straight to sit against.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Where a side return has been infilled, the join between old brick and new blockwork lands mid-run and the two faces are never in one plane. 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. Deep reveals turn a window board into a real piece of stone.