Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in London Bridge

Yes. London Bridge is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE1. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. 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 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. A bathroom slot is booked short and kept short. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Windows are large industrial openings with deep sills, and a run finishing at one meets a reveal a full brick deep. Bathrooms in these buildings are pods built inside the shell, so the walls are new square studwork and the room was set out on paper rather than inherited. Deep reveals turn a window board into a real piece of stone. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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. A cut top is weaker than an uncut one, so it travels differently. 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 van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Everything the bathroom needs comes off the van at once.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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 building turned over floor by floor needs the batch held.

Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. 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. Small pieces are drawn onto the plan, never left to chance. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. 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. Nothing in a bathroom is square, and the top has to be. Confirm what is behind the board where the unit hangs, and send the goods lift and door dimensions if the pieces include shelving. Nobody reseals a worktop annually in a let property, so a material that depends on being resealed is the wrong specification however well it photographs. 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. Wall-hung units suit a bathroom somebody else cleans.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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 low window over the basin caps the splash return.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. 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. A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A slab bought for a bathroom alone is mostly unused, and priced so.

Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. 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. One drawing per bathroom, however alike they look.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Services run on the surface in these buildings, so conduit and pipework cross the wall behind the units and stand proud of it. That makes the template straightforward and moves the work onto the services, which run exposed or in boxing along a wall and get notched round rather than cut back. Concrete walls take a bracket well and a chase badly.