Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Ladywell

Yes. Ladywell is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE13, SE4. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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. One trip in with the top, the shelves and the adhesive. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

The kitchen occupies the ground floor of the addition with a garden door at the far end, so there is a second way in that is narrower than the front door and a great deal shorter. The bathroom in one of these is almost never original: it is a later room over the back addition, or a bedroom divided in two. A boxed riser in the corner is the usual obstacle upstairs. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The scribe on a vanity is measured in depth it cannot spare.

Spindles and a newel cap stand proud of the string, so the usable width on a turn is measured to the handrail rather than to the wall behind it. 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 piece is carried by its long edges, never by the aperture. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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 van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does.

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 fabrication. 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. 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. An en-suite is the same four operations at a smaller size. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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.

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. 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. One slab run, so the bathroom matches the kitchen. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. 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 sloping floor is corrected under the unit, not under the stone. Have the vanity unit fixed and levelled, and the basin and tap on site, before the templater arrives, and tell us what is inside any boxing. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. 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. The stone outlasts the unit under it, whoever owns the flat.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. The chimney breast has almost always been taken out of the kitchen with the stack left standing above it, so that bay of wall is newer plasterwork on a different plane. Either way the walls are thin, the floor is boards over shallow joists and nothing meets at a right angle, so the vanity is scribed at both ends and the unit is fixed back to the wall as well as standing on the floor. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A narrow top nests into waste nobody else wants.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. A narrow top nests into waste a kitchen cut list would otherwise throw away, which makes it the cheapest stone in the job. The bathroom is drawn while the kitchen is still on the bench.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. The top step is rarely the end of it, because a door swinging out onto the landing has to be held back before a piece can come off the flight. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. A cloakroom under the stairs is a short carry into a tight room.