Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Morden

Yes. 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 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 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. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

The chimney breast in the kitchen served a back boiler behind the living room fire, so the flue is a shared one and the breast is deeper than a fireplace would need. 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. The bathroom in a house like this is rarely where it started. 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. 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.

Open-tread and cantilevered stairs give nothing to lean a piece against, so the whole weight stays on the crew for the full length of 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. Small pieces still get crated, because small pieces get dropped. 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. 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. A cloakroom top is a single armful off the tail lift.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. 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. 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. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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. Loft rooms bring an en-suite and a very tight flight.

A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. One slab run, so the bathroom matches the kitchen. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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.

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 units are untouched. Only the top of them changes. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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. The van moves on. The fitter stays with the vanity.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. 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. A narrow top nests into waste nobody else wants.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Communal heating pipework rises through the flat and is boxed in at floor and at ceiling, and none of it moves for a kitchen. 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 same stone as the kitchen, in a narrower cut.

Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. A handrail that has to come off before a piece will pass is twenty minutes at the start of the day, and it goes back on the wall before we leave. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. The way into a bathroom ends at a door that opens inward.