Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Plumstead

Yes. Plumstead is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE18. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Permit hours are what matters, not the permit itself, because a bay that frees up at six in the evening is no use for a template at ten. 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. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Kitchens in the upper flats often sit in the return wing at half-landing level, so there are three or four steps inside the flat before the room is reached at all. 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. Concrete walls take a bracket well and a chase badly. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. Nothing is stood on edge once the tap holes are drilled. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. 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.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop fabrication. 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. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. Two basins in one room is one piece, not two. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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. Loft rooms bring an en-suite and a very tight flight.

The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. 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. Two rooms, one batch, one delivery. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. A boxed soil stack takes depth from where the basin wants 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 owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. 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. A vanity is where an expensive slab stops being expensive.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. 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. A double vanity is a worktop as far as the carry is concerned.

Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. 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. 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. 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. Wall-hung means the wall carries the basin, so the wall gets checked.

A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A vanity is nested last and cut from what is left.