Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Coombe (Croydon)

Yes. Coombe (Croydon) is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. A step up from the drive to the threshold turns the last two metres into a lift, and a lift is where two pairs of hands become the minimum. 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. Everything the bathroom needs comes off the van at once. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Houses on modern estates are built to a handful of standard plans, so the kitchen is square, predictable and modest in area. Bathrooms in these are square, plumb and finished before anyone moves in, so the template is short work and the whole question becomes what the unit is fixed to. An original bathroom is usually the smallest room upstairs. Stud centres are almost never where the brackets would like to be, so fixing positions get set from the framing and the stone is designed to suit. 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. Where the wall bows, the splash return is scribed to follow it.

Booked delivery windows on a managed estate run to an hour, and a worktop install does not happen inside an hour. 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. The piece is carried by its long edges, never by the aperture. Where the van cannot turn on the plot it has to arrive already facing the right way, so the approach along the street is part of the plan. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A cloakroom top is a single armful off the tail lift.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Upgrading a builder-finish kitchen is mostly a swap, so the cost sits in the material choice rather than in the shape of the room. 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. Batched vanity tops are templated in one visit. Handover-spec kitchens are square, plumb and predictable, which means the join count is honest and driven by run length rather than by the building. 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. Two basins in one room is one piece, not two.

It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. 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. Ordered later, the batch match is a gamble rather than a plan. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A partition that gives when you lean on it will give under someone sitting at an overhang, and a bonded mitre nearby is where that movement shows first. 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. A basin cannot be moved to suit a wall that is out of true. Confirm the unit depth for each bathroom separately, book the lift if the building wants it booked, and have both taps on site. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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. Toiletries do more to a bathroom top than water ever will.

Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The room is square, the walls are plumb and the floor is flat, so almost every complication in the job belongs to the building rather than the kitchen. 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 is where an expensive slab stops being expensive.

Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Timber-frame construction with plasterboard linings means every fixing has to find a stud, and a peninsula end needs proper support built in beforehand. Partition walls are plasterboard on studs, and a wall-hung vanity carrying stone wants timber behind the board rather than fixings into plasterboard alone. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return has to meet.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The offcut decides the colour more often than the brochure does.

Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Where a peninsula returns into a stud wall the load has to sit on the units, with the wall doing no more than steadying it. 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. The waste position is fixed before the aperture is drawn.