Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Royal Arsenal Riverside

Yes. Royal Arsenal Riverside 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. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Ceiling heights are held to the minimum the plan allows, so the panel between worktop and wall units is a short piece. Bathrooms in these are square, plumb and finished before anyone moves in, so the template is short work and the whole question becomes what the unit is fixed to. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return has to meet. Where a peninsula returns into a stud wall the load has to sit on the units, with the wall doing no more than steadying it. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Wall-hung means the wall carries the basin, so the wall gets checked.

Concierge buildings want the goods entrance, a booked lift and proof of insurance, all of which is straightforward when it is asked for a week 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. Long thin shelves break on the turn, not on the road. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A second visit for a splash return is one we would rather avoid.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. A specification repeated across several plots has to be repeatable, which quietly rules out the natural stones where no two slabs match. 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. One drawing per bathroom, however alike they look. Replacing one plot years after handover is the problem nobody plans for, because a quartz colour can be reordered and a granite block cannot. 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. A second bathroom is worth ordering with the first.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. 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. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. 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 tile joint behind is what shows a top that is not level. Confirm the unit depth for each bathroom separately, book the lift if the building wants it booked, and have both taps on site. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. 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. Access to a tenanted bathroom is arranged, not assumed.

Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The room is square, the walls are plumb and the floor is flat, so almost every complication in the job belongs to the building rather than the 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. Most vanity tops begin life as an offcut from another room.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. 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. Where the kitchen eats the slab, the bathroom buys its own.

Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Every flat on the floor is the same plan handed left and right, so the room is predictable even where the building is not. Partition walls are plasterboard on studs, and a wall-hung vanity carrying stone wants timber behind the board rather than fixings into plasterboard alone. A separate WC becomes a cloakroom with a very small top.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. The room is genuinely square and the units are plumb, so the visit is more about the building than about the kitchen. Bathrooms in these are square, plumb and finished before anyone moves in, so the template is short work and the question moves to what the unit is fixed to. Old pipework is boxed rather than moved, and the top notches round it.