Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Middle Park

Yes. Middle Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE9. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

An ex-council house is solidly built to a standard plan, with the kitchen at the rear and a back door next to it. The complication is the service riser boxed into a corner: the top is notched round it with a radiused internal corner, never a square one, and the notch is machined at the works from a measurement taken at the finished face. What the wall is made of decides how the unit is fixed. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan.

A steep pitch shortens the tread and lengthens the reach, which leaves whoever is below carrying most of the weight for the full 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. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. 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. Everything the bathroom needs comes off the van at once.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop fabrication. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. 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. Batched vanity tops are templated in one visit. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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. Two basins in one room is one piece, not two.

A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. 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. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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. The scribe on a vanity is measured in depth it cannot spare. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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. Approval comes before the aperture is drawn, not after.

Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. A cloakroom top is a single armful off the tail lift.

A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. These kitchens give three metres of usable wall and no more, so a dimension out by a few millimetres costs a whole run rather than a piece. 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. The depth sets the piece, not the length of the wall.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. A sloping floor is corrected under the unit, not under the stone.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. Where the kitchen swallows the whole slab there is no offcut worth having, and the vanity then has to be priced against material bought for itself. The bathroom is drawn while the kitchen is still on the bench.