Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in New Cross

Yes. New Cross is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE14. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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 plumber and the van rarely want the street on the same day. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Floors are the original joists with a later acoustic layer laid over them, and that layer is not flat where it meets the doorways. 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. A rear addition bathroom is cold, narrow and full of pipework. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A sloping floor is corrected under the unit, not under the stone.

A step up off the pavement means the piece is lifted to the threshold before it is carried anywhere, and that first lift is the one that wants four hands. 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 cut top is weaker than an uncut one, so it travels differently. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Two pieces and a tube of sealant is the whole delivery.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. A landlord ordering several kitchens at once is buying a specification once and then repeating it, so the early decisions are worth taking slowly. 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. Where every bathroom matches, one slab covers the building. Shared-house kitchens take heavier use from more people than a family kitchen does, and the surface gets chosen on that basis rather than on looks. 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 landlord specifying once is specifying tap holes once.

The wall between the original room and the return usually carries a steel, and the plaster line above it steps, so anything full height behind the run is measured separately from the top. 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. One slab run, so the bathroom matches the kitchen. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. 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 tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled. 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. Where a letting agent sits between us and the owner the approval passes through two sets of hands, so a quote has to be clear enough to forward without a covering explanation. 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. Whoever chooses the tap is setting the hole spacing.

The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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 pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. A Victorian hall arch sits lower than the ceiling either side of it, and it is the point a piece carried on edge meets first. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Long thin shelves break on the turn, not on the road.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. 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 booked window suits a bathroom better than it suits a kitchen.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A single long run down one side puts every cut-out in one piece, so the sink, the hob and any drainer grooves all take material out of the same length. 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.