Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Deptford

Yes. Deptford is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE8. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. Streets near a ground or a venue have restrictions that come and go with the fixture list rather than with the time of day. 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. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

The communal stair is wide and handsome and the flat door at the top of it is a standard leaf, which is where a long piece stops. The bathroom in one of these is almost never original: it is a later room over the back addition, or a bedroom divided in two. Old pipework is boxed rather than moved, and the top notches round it. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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 wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone.

A height barrier on the car park entrance rules out a tail-lift van outright, and the stone then transfers to a trolley at the barrier itself. 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. A cloakroom under the stairs is a short carry into a tight room. On an event day the controls are wider, tighter and enforced harder than the signage suggests on any other morning of the week. 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.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop fabrication. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. 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. 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. A converted house needs a vanity on every floor. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. The bathroom is decided late and the offcut has usually gone.

Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. 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. A slab bought for a bathroom alone is mostly unused, and priced so. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. Where the wall bows, the splash return is scribed to follow it. 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. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. 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. Approval comes before the aperture is drawn, not after.

Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. 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 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. A basin cannot be moved to suit a wall that is out of true.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Kitchens in the upper flats often sit in the return wing at half-landing level, so there are three or four steps inside the flat before the room is reached at all. 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. Square rooms make short work of a vanity template.

If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Injected damp courses and re-rendered lower walls leave the bottom metre standing proud of everything above it. 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. Most vanity tops begin life as an offcut from another room.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. 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 run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The bathroom pieces are labelled on the nest before the saw runs.