Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Elmers End

Yes. Elmers End is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR3. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. 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 vanity fit ends before most parking restrictions do. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Ceiling heights are low and the window head sits close to the ceiling, so the band of wall above the worktop is short. 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. The soil stack decides the basin position more than taste does. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one.

Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Nothing is stood on edge once the tap holes are drilled. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The plumber and the van rarely want the street on the same day.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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. One tap across a building means one drilling setup.

Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. 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. The bathroom pieces are labelled on the nest before the saw runs. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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. Half-tiled walls leave a line the top has to meet. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. A let bathroom wants quartz for the same reason a let kitchen does: nothing to seal, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be briefed on. Wall-hung units suit a bathroom somebody else cleans.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Where the external walls have been overboarded to insulate them the room is fifty millimetres smaller than the drawing and the board sounds hollow throughout. 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. Bathrooms take the same slab and roughly half the width.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. 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. What the kitchen cannot use, the vanity usually can.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. These blocks have been through at least one refurbishment programme, so the kitchen is a modern unit fit inside an old shell. Bathrooms in these flats are compact and squarely built, and take a short vanity that comes out of almost any offcut. What the wall is made of decides how the unit is fixed.

A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. The communal stair is concrete with a metal handrail and a solid half-landing wall, so there is nothing to take off to gain a few millimetres. 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 bathroom in a house like this is rarely where it started.