Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Forest Hill

Yes. Forest Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE23. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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 plumber and the van rarely want the street on the same day. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

A large villa has wide doors, a generous hall and somewhere to park, so the joins that go in are chosen for layout rather than forced by the route. Bathrooms in houses this size are big enough for a double vanity, and a top with two basins and several tap holes is a worktop by any honest measure: it is nested like one, carried like one and priced like one. The window over the basin is the one the top answers to. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A shelf in a shower niche is scribed on three sides.

A tiled hall floor takes a dropped corner badly, so boards go down over the tiles before anything comes through the door. 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 turn at the head of the stairs decides a double vanity. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Two pieces and a tube of sealant is the whole delivery.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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. One drawing per bathroom, however alike they look. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. A second bathroom is worth ordering with the first.

The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. 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. Two bathrooms nest better together than either does alone. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. Send the unit layout for every bathroom at once with the basin and tap models against each, so the slab can be nested for all of them. A quartz sample left on the counter for a week under the actual kitchen lights settles more arguments than any showroom, and an owner is the only person in a position to do that. 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. Wall-hung units suit a bathroom somebody else cleans.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Every internal doorway on the way through is another frame to clear, and internal doors come off their hinges rather than being propped open. What the route really decides for a bathroom is the shelving and the window board, since long thin pieces are the ones that break when they are twisted round a turn. Offcut-sized pieces are the easiest stone in the trade to move.

Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. 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. It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The waste from a basin aperture is what a shelf is cut from.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The old scullery is a step down from the main room and the pantry beyond it is a step down again. 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. We seat the basin. Your plumber connects it.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. 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. Small pieces are drawn onto the plan, never left to chance.