Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Roundshaw

Yes. Roundshaw is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SM6. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Sutton. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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 basin travels in the van with the top it belongs to. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Meters were moved out to a box on the flank wall on a later programme, and the cupboard they came out of is usually still standing in the corner. The complication is the service riser boxed into a corner: the top is notched round it with a radiused internal corner, never a square one, and the notch is machined at the works from a measurement taken at the finished face. A bathroom carved out of a bedroom keeps the bedroom window. 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. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan.

Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. 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. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. A second visit for a splash return is one we would rather avoid.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. An en-suite is the same four operations at a smaller size. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. One tap across a building means one drilling setup.

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. A vanity is nested last and cut from what is left. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. The scribe on a vanity is measured in depth it cannot spare. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. Where a landlord or housing provider is involved there is a specification to meet and a process to follow, and both are settled before a date is offered. 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 basin model is confirmed by whoever ordered it.

Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. 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. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. 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. 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.

Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. The ground floor is a solid slab with a bitumen membrane and no void under it, so services either run on the surface or get chased into something hard. The service riser is boxed into a corner of the room, and the top is notched round it with a radiused internal corner rather than a square one. Deep reveals turn a window board into a real piece of stone.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. There is nearly always a boxed soil stack or a service riser in a corner of the run, and it is rarely mentioned at enquiry. 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. One piece, four operations, and nowhere for any of them to move.

Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Booked delivery windows on a managed estate run to an hour, and a worktop install does not happen inside an hour. 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 window board is the piece that catches a door frame.