Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Rotherhithe

Yes. Rotherhithe is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE16. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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. A second visit for a splash return is one we would rather avoid. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The staircase rises over the back room in a good number of these, so a sloping bulkhead sits over one end of the run and a piece cannot be stood on edge beneath it. The bathroom in one of these is usually a later addition over the back kitchen, so the walls are thinner, the floor moves and a vanity has to sit level in a room that is not. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return has to meet. A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The waste position is fixed before the aperture is drawn.

Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. 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. Two hands to a shelf, four to a double vanity. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Short jobs suffer most from a van that has to move.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop installation. 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. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Where every bathroom matches, one slab covers the building. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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 landlord specifying once is specifying tap holes once.

The free end is what needs deciding early: square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall to the floor, and a waterfall is cut in sequence off the same part of the slab. 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. A double vanity is nested like a worktop, not like an offcut. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. 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. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one. 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. 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. A specification repeated across flats is drawn once.

Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. Where the sill lands inside the height an upstand would occupy there is no upstand, and the stone either dies into the reveal or stops short of it. 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. Half-tiled walls leave a line the top has to meet.

A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. A two-up two-down has a kitchen that was never designed to be one, so the run is short, the ceiling is low and every millimetre of depth gets argued over. Where a bedroom has been divided to make a bathroom the window sits off centre to the new room and the vanity ends up under it, which puts the window board in the order rather than outside it. A separate WC becomes a cloakroom with a very small top.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Peninsulas frequently land on a lightweight partition or on units that were never fixed down, and stone needs proper support under it before it goes on. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Shelves and a window board come out of the same corner of the slab.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Because a peninsula is seen from both sides, the underside of any overhang gets the same edge treatment as the top, which is easy to leave out of a spec. 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. The bathroom order is cheapest while the kitchen is still open.