Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Peckham

Yes. Peckham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE15. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. A van waiting on a loading concession has somebody standing with it, because a vehicle left unattended is the one that collects the ticket. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. We arrive with the offcut pieces already labelled by room. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

The communal stair is wide and handsome and the flat door at the top of it is a standard leaf, which is where a long piece stops. 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 bathroom carved out of a bedroom keeps the bedroom window. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan.

Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. 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. Long thin shelves break on the turn, not on the road. 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 bathroom booked on its own rarely fills a day, so it can be put into whichever part of the day the street is easiest. An en-suite and a family bathroom come off the same load.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Batching several kitchens together is the one situation where buying a whole slab is cheaper per kitchen rather than more expensive. 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. Cloakrooms are the piece most often forgotten at ordering. A licensed shared house has fire-door and escape-route rules that decide how and when stone can be carried through the common parts. 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. Repeat bathrooms come cheaper per top, not per square metre.

An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. 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 template visit covers both rooms if both are ready. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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 scribe on a vanity is measured in depth it cannot spare. 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. Consent for the work sits with the freeholder or the managing body, and getting it in writing first avoids a crew arriving to a locked door. 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. The tap is bought before the top is drilled, whoever buys it.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. 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 vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. No basin aperture is worth rushing for a parking bay.

The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. 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. 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 sloping floor is corrected under the unit, not under the stone.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. Chimney breasts and the alcoves either side of them break the run into short pieces before anyone has drawn a kitchen. 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. A vanity is where an expensive slab stops being expensive.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The vanity comes off what the kitchen leaves behind.