Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Crystal Palace

Yes. Crystal Palace is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE19, SE20. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. 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 whole bathroom fits on a trolley in one load. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A deep butler sink and a boiling tap on the same length put two heavy cut-outs within a metre of each other. A freestanding bath in the middle of the room pushes the vanity to a wall and often under a window, so the window board is drawn with the top rather than added later from a second offcut. A pod bathroom inside a shell has walls built last week. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A basin cannot be moved to suit a wall that is out of true.

Open-tread and cantilevered stairs give nothing to lean a piece against, so the whole weight stays on the crew for the full length of the flight. 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 landing turn matters more than the front door for a bathroom. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A bay for twenty minutes is enough for a vanity.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. 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. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme. 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. A building turned over floor by floor needs the batch held.

A downdraught extractor takes a long slot out of the middle of the piece and a motor housing out of the cabinet below it, so what sits under the top is settled before anything is cut. 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 offcut decides the colour more often than the brochure does. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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. The waste position is fixed before the aperture is drawn. Send the unit layout for every bathroom at once with the basin and tap models against each, so the slab can be nested for all of them. Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. 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. Owner bathrooms get the slab viewed; let ones get the sample.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. A larder, a butler sink and a dresser run put more edges and more cut-outs into the job than the floor area suggests. 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. Small enough to carry, awkward enough to plan.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. The kitchen is nearly always in a later rear or side extension, so half the room is a century older than the other half and the two meet mid-run. A vanity top is where all of that turns up in miniature, with the basin, the tap holes and a splash return crowded into a few hundred millimetres of stone. The aperture is polished because you look straight down into it.

Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. 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. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through 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. Half-tiled walls leave a line the top has to meet.