Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Grove Park

Yes. Grove Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE12. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Tap holes are drilled at the works, so nothing keeps the van waiting. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

The kitchen sits at the rear with a door to the garden and a window over the sink, so the useful run is broken into two short lengths. The original bathroom in these houses is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against a wall at each end, so both ends are scribed and there is no tolerance left between them. The soil stack decides the basin position more than taste does. 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 vanity has no depth to give away to a scribe.

A loading bay or a red route puts a clock on the unload, so the pieces come off in the order they will be fitted rather than the order they were loaded. 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. Loft en-suites arrive up the tightest flight in the house. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. 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. The basin travels in the van with the top it belongs to.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. A repeated top is still drilled to the taps actually bought. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. A rear addition adds a cloakroom before it adds anything else.

Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. One template visit covers both rooms if both are ready. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

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. 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. Settle the tiling height and the basin model first, and let us know whether the unit is standing on the floor or hanging off the wall. Where a landlord or housing provider is involved there is a specification to meet and a process to follow, and both are settled before a date is offered. 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. Marble on a vanity marks, and that is said before it is cut.

Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. The van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. The piece is carried by its long edges, never by the aperture.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. The kitchen door opens inwards into the middle of a run, so the usable length of that wall stops well short of the corner. 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. Most vanity tops begin life as an offcut from another room.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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. A boxed soil stack takes depth from where the basin wants 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. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. These were built in short runs of six or eight houses, so the party walls are solid brick and the rear elevation is a straight line with no outriggers. Half-tiled walls are the norm, and the tile line is what the splash return has to meet, which is a decision taken before machining rather than discovered afterwards. What the wall is made of decides how the unit is fixed.