Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Oval

Yes. Oval is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE11. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. Controlled hours that end in the middle of the afternoon make the second half of the day easy and put the whole problem in the first half. 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 whole bathroom fits on a trolley in one load. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Original shutter boxes survive in the reveals of the front rooms and stand proud of the plaster, and that is the line a run under the window has to be scribed to. 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. Older walls give a vanity nothing straight to sit against. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Nothing in a bathroom is square, and the top has to be.

Pendant fittings over the stairwell and anything hung on the half-landing come down first, because a piece on edge sweeps a wider arc than the people carrying it. 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. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A bay for twenty minutes is enough for a vanity.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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. The bathroom is decided late and the offcut has usually gone. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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. Batched vanity tops are templated in one visit.

A breakfast bar on the outer side is an overhang like any other, and the support under it is sized for people leaning on the end rather than for the weight of the stone alone. 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. Small pieces are drawn onto the plan, never left to chance. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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 low window over the basin caps the splash return. 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 ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. A let bathroom wants quartz for the same reason a let kitchen does: nothing to seal, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be briefed on. Whoever signs it off is whoever chooses the basin.

Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. 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 slab bought for a bathroom alone is mostly unused, and priced so.

Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. Where the floor falls away the unit is packed level first, because a top that follows a sloping floor announces it against the tile joints behind. The scribe on a vanity is measured in depth it cannot spare.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. 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. The tap decides the drilling, so the tap is settled first.