Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Maze Hill

Yes. Maze Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE10, SE3. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. The van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The flat entrance door is a certified fire door on a closer, and taking it off for an hour means dealing with the seals and the closer before the day ends. 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. Boarded floors give, and a vanity shows it at the tile line. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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.

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. 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 cloakroom under the stairs is a short carry into a tight room. 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. A bathroom slot is booked short and kept short.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop replacement. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. 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. Repeat bathrooms come cheaper per top, not per square metre. 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 converted house needs a vanity on every floor.

A doorway partway along one wall breaks that side into two separate pieces, and two short pieces cost more between them than the single long one they replace. 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. A narrow top nests into waste nobody else wants. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. 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. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. 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. Approval comes before the aperture is drawn, not after.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Ground floors fall away towards the garden across the whole footprint, so the units are packed up long before anything is measured for stone. 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. Nothing about a vanity is standard except the depth of the unit.

Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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 vanity has no depth to give away to a scribe.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Nothing changes hands until after the template. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. The back addition is frequently a single skin of brick rendered on both faces, which takes a fixing badly and moves with the weather. A vanity top is where all of that turns up in miniature, with the basin, the tap holes and a splash return crowded into a few hundred millimetres of stone. A cloakroom top and an en-suite top are one job at two sizes.

Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Boxed sash frames swallow a hundred millimetres of wall on each side of the opening, so the wall between a window and a corner is shorter than a plan makes it look. 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. A rear addition bathroom is cold, narrow and full of pipework.