Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in East Dulwich

Yes. East Dulwich is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE22. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Some zones are controlled for a short window in the middle of the day and open either side of it, which makes the timing of the visit the whole question. 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 van moves on. The fitter stays with the vanity. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The original scullery gully is still live in the yard outside the back door, and new waste from the sink joins a drain laid for a copper and a stone sink. 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. A boxed riser in the corner is the usual obstacle upstairs. Casement handles and stays swing down into the space above the worktop, so the clearance that counts is the one measured with the window open. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Nothing in a bathroom is square, and the top has to be.

The top step is rarely the end of it, because a door swinging out onto the landing has to be held back before a piece can come off 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. A suspension only works if the cones and the notice are actually there on the morning, and now and then a car is sitting in the bay regardless. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Ordered with the kitchen, the bathroom costs no extra journey.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is 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. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. Cloakrooms are the piece most often forgotten at ordering. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. Repeat bathrooms come cheaper per top, not per square metre.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. 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 cloakroom top is the easiest piece on any nesting plan. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. 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 low window over the basin caps the splash return. 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. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. 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 stone outlasts the unit under it, whoever owns the flat.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Yield is why a vanity in a rare stone is still affordable.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. The rear door swings inward across the end of the run, so the last few hundred millimetres of worktop are only reachable with the door shut. 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. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing.

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. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan.

If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. Money does not move until the template is done. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The original front door is narrow and the hall is often the only way in, which puts a ceiling on the longest single piece. 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 bathroom is a short job that repays being drawn properly.