Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in East Wickham

Yes. East Wickham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA16. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. 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. 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 hot water cylinder sits in a cupboard opening off the kitchen or the landing above it, and the pipework to it drops through the corner of the room. The complication is the service riser boxed into a corner: the top is notched round it with a radiused internal corner, never a square one, and the notch is machined at the works from a measurement taken at the finished face. A separate WC becomes a cloakroom with a very small top. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The waste position is fixed before the aperture is drawn.

Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Small pieces still get crated, because small pieces get dropped. 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. 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 replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop templating. 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. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. 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. An en-suite is the same four operations at a smaller size. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. 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. One tap across a building means one drilling setup.

The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. 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. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

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. 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. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. Access is arranged through a managing agent or a scheme office rather than with the household directly, so a date gets confirmed once in writing and moving it costs a fortnight. 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 tap is bought before the top is drilled, whoever buys it.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. 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 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.

The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. A bathroom booked on its own rarely fills a day, so it can be put into whichever part of the day the street is easiest. A bathroom return visit is planned around the street, not the diary.

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. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. Where the kitchen swallows the whole slab there is no offcut worth having, and the vanity then has to be priced against material bought for itself. The bathroom pieces are labelled on the nest before the saw runs.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. A narrow top nests into waste a kitchen cut list would otherwise throw away, which makes it the cheapest stone in the job. What the kitchen cannot use, the vanity usually can.