Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Norbury

Yes. Norbury is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW16. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. 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. No basin aperture is worth rushing for a parking bay. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The addition is one room wide, so the run is a galley with a door at one end and a window at the other and no wall long enough for anything else. 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. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return has to meet. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A vanity has no depth to give away to a scribe.

Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. The turn at the head of the stairs decides a double vanity. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The bathroom pieces come off last and go in first.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands 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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. A second bathroom is worth ordering with the first.

A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Offcut stock is the cheapest stone a vanity will ever sit on. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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 unit is packed level before the top goes near it. 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. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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. Marble on a vanity marks, and that is said before it is cut.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. A hundred and forty years of alterations sit under the current kitchen, and the worktop is what has to sit flat on top of all of it. 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. It is the smallest piece we cut and the most crowded.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. 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. Two rooms, one batch, one delivery.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Offcut-sized pieces are the easiest stone in the trade to move.

The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. The step down from the main house into the addition is commonly a hundred to a hundred and fifty millimetres, which gives the kitchen a different floor datum from the rest of the ground floor. Either way the walls are thin, the floor is boards over shallow joists and nothing meets at a right angle, so the vanity is scribed at both ends and the unit is fixed back to the wall as well as standing on the floor. A separate WC becomes a cloakroom with a very small top.