Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Monks Orchard

Yes. Monks Orchard is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0, BR3. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. 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. 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. Everything the bathroom needs comes off the van at once. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The internal stair is usually a straight flight with a tight top landing, and it is the landing rather than the flight that is the limit. Bathrooms in this stock are compact, squarely built and take a short vanity that will come out of almost any offcut, which makes them among the cheapest bathroom tops we cut. Stud partitions want noggins before a wall-hung unit goes up. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Wall-hung means the wall carries the basin, so the wall gets checked.

Concierge buildings want the goods entrance, a booked lift and proof of insurance, all of which is straightforward when it is asked for a week out. 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 vanity top goes wherever a person will go. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A cloakroom top is a single armful off the tail lift.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. 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. 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. A building turned over floor by floor needs the batch held. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. 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 vanity comes off what the kitchen leaves behind. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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 tile joint behind is what shows a top that is not level. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. 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. The tap is bought before the top is drilled, whoever buys it.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Bollards, planters and a one-way service road can turn what looks like a ten-metre carry into a fifty-metre one. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Carried flat on a board once the aperture has been cut.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. These are built in dense concrete, so support for a peninsula or an end panel goes in with proper anchors rather than plugs. The service riser is boxed into a corner of the room, and the top is notched round it with a radiused internal corner rather than a square one. A bathroom over a kitchen has its waste run already decided.

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. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. 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 stud wall takes a vanity only once there is timber behind it.

The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Money does not move until the template is done. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Walls and ceilings carry decades of thick emulsion over artex, and neither surface tells you where the true line is. 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. The same stone as the kitchen, in a narrower cut.