Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in New Addington

Yes. New Addington is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. A cloakroom top is a single armful off the tail lift. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These were built on a solid ground floor slab, so nothing bounces and nothing can be packed down, only up. The bathroom is the small room over the kitchen, and the waste already runs where it needs to, so the basin position is more or less settled before anyone draws anything. Concrete walls take a bracket well and a chase badly. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A shelf in a shower niche is scribed on three sides.

There is no leaning a piece against a wall halfway up, so any flight longer than a dozen treads is planned around a rest point on a landing. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Small pieces still get crated, because small pieces get dropped. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The van moves on. The fitter stays with the vanity.

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 splashbacks & upstands 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. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. The bathroom is drawn while the kitchen is still on the bench. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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 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 vanity has no depth to give away to a scribe. Measure from the finished unit up to the underside of the window sill and send it with the basin and tap models. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. 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. Keys, dates and the basin should sit with the same person.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Doorways are 762mm at best, and the turn from the hall into the kitchen is the pinch point rather than the front door. 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. A bathroom is a short job that repays being drawn properly.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The units are untouched. Only the top of them changes. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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. Ordered with the kitchen, the bathroom costs no extra journey.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Plaster over blockwork is thin and hollow in patches, so anything fixed back to the wall needs a sound spot found first. 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. One piece, four operations, and nowhere for any of them to move.

Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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 unit is packed level before the top goes near it.