Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Lessness Heath

Yes. Lessness Heath is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA17. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. 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. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

A good number have a garage attached to the flank wall with a door through from the kitchen, which is both a way in and a stretch of wall the run cannot use. 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. Older walls give a vanity nothing straight to sit against. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Nothing in a bathroom is square, and the top has to be.

Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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 splash return travels with the top it belongs to. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. A bathroom slot is booked short and kept short.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. 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. 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. Repeat work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought. 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. 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. Several small tops nest better than one large one.

The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The vanity comes off what the kitchen leaves behind. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

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 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 low window over the basin caps the splash return. 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. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. 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.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. These kitchens have usually been retiled twice and knocked through once, and both of those leave marks the worktop has to deal with. 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. Shelves and a window board come off the same offcut.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. 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. Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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. Stone reaches a bathroom in one trip or it does not reach it.

Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan.

Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. The workmanship guarantee is the same either way. It does not extend to a material we did not supply. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. 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. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme.