Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Peckham Rye

Yes. Peckham Rye is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE15, SE22. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. 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. We arrive with the offcut pieces already labelled by room. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Handmade brick and lime plaster move visibly along a run, and a straight-cut back edge shows it immediately. A freestanding bath in the middle of the room pushes the vanity to a wall and often under a window, so the window board is drawn with the top rather than added later from a second offcut. A large bathroom is where a double vanity becomes possible. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The unit is packed level before the top goes near it.

A narrow entrance hall with a turn into the back of the house caps the longest piece we can physically get in, whatever the run itself measures. 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 vanity top goes wherever a person will go. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. An en-suite and a family bathroom come off the same load.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. 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. A second bathroom is worth ordering with the first. 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. 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. Small tops are where a slab finally gets fully used.

It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. 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. Shelves and a window board come out of the same corner of the slab. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

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 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 boxed soil stack takes depth from where the basin wants it. Send the unit layout for every bathroom at once with the basin and tap models against each, so the slab can be nested for all of them. Owner-occupied kitchens are usually being done once, which is why the edge profile, the vein direction and where a join falls are worth the conversation. 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.

An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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. Wall-hung means the wall carries the basin, so the wall gets checked.

The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. The kitchen is nearly always in a later rear or side extension, so half the room is a century older than the other half and the two meet mid-run. 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. Shelves and a window board come off the same offcut.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The bathroom order is cheapest while the kitchen is still open.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. 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 cloakroom top is the easiest piece on any nesting plan.