Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Lower Morden

Yes. Lower Morden is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SM4. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. 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. We arrive with the offcut pieces already labelled by room. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The room is wide enough that an island turns up in nearly every scheme, and how far the drainage can be taken is what fixes where it sits. Half-tiled walls are the norm, and the tile line is what the splash return has to meet, which is a decision taken before machining rather than discovered afterwards. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return has to meet. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A low window over the basin caps the splash return.

A carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. 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. Two hands to a shelf, four to a double vanity. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. An en-suite and a family bathroom come off the same load.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop design & quotation and worktop fabrication. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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.

The two returns in a U are close to the same size and it is tempting to nest them side by side, except that the veining then mirrors across the room and reads as deliberate for the wrong reason. 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 thickness follows the kitchen unless you ask otherwise. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

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. 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. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan. 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 paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. 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. A bathroom done once is worth the conversation about finish.

Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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. The scribe on a vanity is measured in depth it cannot spare.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Three runs is three scribes and three separate lifts, so a U takes longer on site than its metreage suggests even on a day when nothing goes wrong. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A double vanity is nested like a worktop, not like an offcut.

Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. Order is what matters: a slab is templated before it is cut, so an uncut slab is straightforward and one already machined for another kitchen is not. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. The hall is the only way in and out for whoever lives there, so it is cleared and then kept clear for as long as pieces are moving. 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. The staircase is the last stage of every bathroom carry.