Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Keston

Yes. Keston is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR2. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. 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. 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 whole bathroom fits on a trolley in one load. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

A period cottage has low ceilings, thick rubble-filled walls and a floor that has never been level, and the worktop is the thing that has to look straight. 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. A separate WC becomes a cloakroom with a very small top. 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 stud wall takes a vanity only once there is timber behind it.

A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. 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 way into a bathroom ends at a door that opens inward. 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. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A bay for twenty minutes is enough for a vanity.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. 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. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. En-suites and family bathrooms rarely take the same depth. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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 work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought.

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. 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.

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. Nothing in a bathroom is square, and the top has to be. 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. Nothing in a vanity quote is bundled into the kitchen.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. 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. 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. A low window over the basin caps the splash return.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. 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. What the kitchen cannot use, the vanity usually can.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Doorways are low and narrow, which is a genuine constraint on piece length before anything else is considered. 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 other measure. Old pipework is boxed rather than moved, and the top notches round it.

Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Sliding or folding doors take the whole garden wall, so a long stretch of the room has glass where a wall would otherwise carry the units. A vanity top is where all of that turns up in miniature, with the basin, the tap holes and a splash return crowded into a few hundred millimetres of stone. One visit, sitting between two plumbing visits.