Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Kidbrooke

Yes. Kidbrooke is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE3, SE9. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. We arrive with the offcut pieces already labelled by room. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Services were designed in rather than added later, so waste and feeds come up where the drawing put them and the sink is not moving. Partition walls are plasterboard on studs, and a wall-hung vanity carrying stone wants timber behind the board rather than fixings into plasterboard alone. Boarded floors give, and a vanity shows it at the tile line. Stud centres are almost never where the brackets would like to be, so fixing positions get set from the framing and the stone is designed to suit. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The top follows the unit, and the unit follows a level.

A goods lift booked by the hour puts a clock on the whole delivery, so pieces go up in a planned order and nothing is handled twice. 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. A double vanity is a worktop as far as the carry is concerned. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. 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. An en-suite and a family bathroom come off the same load.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. 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. En-suites and family bathrooms rarely take the same depth. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Repeat work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. One slab run, so the bathroom matches the kitchen. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

A partition that gives when you lean on it will give under someone sitting at an overhang, and a bonded mitre nearby is where that movement shows first. 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 shelf in a shower niche is scribed on three sides. Confirm the unit depth for each bathroom separately, book the lift if the building wants it booked, and have both taps on site. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. 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. Durability wins in a let bathroom, and it should.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. 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. A narrow top nests into waste nobody else wants.

Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. An infill house is built to modern standards on an old plot, so the room is square even though the site around it is not. Bathrooms in these are square, plumb and finished before anyone moves in, so the template is short work and the question moves to what the unit is fixed to. A rear addition bathroom is cold, narrow and full of pipework.

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. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Access is a question about the plot rather than the house: a narrow frontage between older buildings with nowhere obvious to stand a van. Partition walls are plasterboard on studs, so a wall-hung unit wants timber behind the board, and that has to be there before the stone arrives rather than after. Older walls give a vanity nothing straight to sit against.

The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. No basin aperture is worth rushing for a parking bay.