Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in New Eltham

Yes. New Eltham 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. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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. An en-suite and a family bathroom come off the same load. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Wide doorways and level thresholds mean full-length pieces go in whole and the join count comes down to slab length alone. The original bathroom in these houses is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against a wall at each end, so both ends are scribed and there is no tolerance left between them. A separate WC becomes a cloakroom with a very small top. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled.

A loading bay or a red route puts a clock on the unload, so the pieces come off in the order they will be fitted rather than the order they were loaded. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Stone reaches a bathroom in one trip or it does not reach it. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. 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. No basin aperture is worth rushing for a parking bay.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop design & quotation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. One drawing per bathroom, however alike they look.

Three runs means two internal corners, and each corner is a decision about mitre or butt joint before anything is nested. 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. A double vanity is nested like a worktop, not like an offcut. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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 pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one. Settle the tiling height and the basin model first, and let us know whether the unit is standing on the floor or hanging off the wall. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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.

What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. The van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. What the route really decides for a bathroom is the shelving and the window board, since long thin pieces are the ones that break when they are twisted round a turn. The turn at the head of the stairs decides a double vanity.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. A serving hatch through to the dining room is common, and closing one up leaves a panel of newer wall exactly where the run passes. 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 stone is the simple half of a bathroom fit.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. 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 bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Where the roof has been converted there is usually a steel over the kitchen that went in after the walls, and the run beneath it is worth checking for square. Half-tiled walls are the norm, and the tile line is what the splash return has to meet, which is a decision taken before machining rather than discovered afterwards. Old pipework is boxed rather than moved, and the top notches round it.