Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Denmark Hill

Yes. Denmark Hill 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. Where the drive is shared, the half-hour the van spends in the way is agreed with the neighbour in advance rather than apologised for at the time. 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 cloakroom top is a single armful off the tail lift. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Original joinery is deep and stands proud of the plaster, so the run is plotted to the units rather than to the wall behind them. Bathrooms in houses this size are big enough for a double vanity, and a top with two basins and several tap holes is a worktop by any honest measure: it is nested like one, carried like one and priced like one. A boxed riser in the corner is the usual obstacle upstairs. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The unit is packed level before the top goes near it.

Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. 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. 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. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The van moves on. The fitter stays with the vanity.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is 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 new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Cloakrooms are the piece most often forgotten at ordering. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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 bathrooms come cheaper per top, not per square metre.

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. One template visit covers both rooms if both are ready. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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 boxed soil stack takes depth from where the basin wants it. 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 someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. 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. An agent sees the vanity line and asks about tiling instead.

What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Weight tells on a staircase more than anywhere else, because there is nowhere to set a piece down mid-flight and no way to change your grip once it is moving. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. An en-suite off a bedroom adds a second flight, not a second job.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. Every flight adds a set of handling movements, and handling is where stone gets damaged, so a fourth-floor walk-up is priced by the flight rather than by the metre. 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 bath is usually in the way before the doorway is.

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. Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The vanity comes off what the kitchen leaves behind.

Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. 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. 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. A converted house needs a vanity on every floor.