Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Elephant and Castle

Yes. Elephant and Castle is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE1, SE17. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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 second visit for a splash return is one we would rather avoid. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The floor is a screed over concrete finished in vinyl, hard and flat but rarely level, so the units are packed rather than the stone being cut down to meet them. Bathrooms in this stock are compact, squarely built and take a short vanity that will come out of almost any offcut, which makes them among the cheapest bathroom tops we cut. Square rooms make short work of a vanity template. 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. A vanity has no depth to give away to a scribe.

The lift is only part of the route, and the corridor from the lobby to the flat door often holds a tighter turn than the car does. 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. Long thin shelves break on the turn, not on the road. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Short jobs suffer most from a van that has to move.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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 doorway partway along one wall breaks that side into two separate pieces, and two short pieces cost more between them than the single long one they replace. 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. Ordered later, the batch match is a gamble rather than a plan. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

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. The unit is packed level before the top goes near it. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. Where the provider has set the specification the material choice was made once for a great many kitchens, and the useful work is meeting it exactly rather than proposing something else on the day. 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. Honed stone in a bathroom asks more of whoever cleans it.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Windows went in on a programme with plastic frames set into the original openings, so the frame is thicker, the glass area smaller and the reveal has a liner over the concrete. Bathrooms in these flats are compact and squarely built, and take a short vanity that comes out of almost any offcut. A large bathroom is where a double vanity becomes possible.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. The landing serves two or three front doors that open outward onto it, so the space to turn a piece at the top of the flight is not entirely yours to use. The service riser is boxed into a corner of the room, and the top is notched round it with a radiused internal corner rather than a square one. The soil stack decides the basin position more than taste does.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Internal partitions are dense block finished in a hard sand and cement plaster, which is unforgiving to drill and unforgiving to make good. 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. The depth sets the piece, not the length of the wall.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Handles on opposing runs meet in the middle of the aisle, so a deep edge profile specified on both sides takes width out of the standing space twice over. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The offcut decides the colour more often than the brochure does.