Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Rushey Green

Yes. Rushey Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE6. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. 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 work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The larder under the stairs is usually still there and still opens into the kitchen, so the run stops at a door that cannot be moved. 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. The window over the basin is the one the top answers to. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone.

A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. 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. The way into a bathroom ends at a door that opens inward. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. 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 particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop fabrication. 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. One tap across a building means one drilling setup. 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. 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. Cloakrooms are the piece most often forgotten at ordering.

Bi-fold or sliding doors at the end of the return mean the run finishes against a frame rather than a wall, and a frame gives nothing to scribe into and no movement to take up. 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. The thickness follows the kitchen unless you ask otherwise. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Casement handles and stays swing down into the space above the worktop, so the clearance that counts is the one measured with the window open. 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. Where the wall bows, the splash return is scribed to follow 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. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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. Access to a tenanted bathroom is arranged, not assumed.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. 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 basin cannot be moved to suit a wall that is out of true.

Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. 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. A vanity top is where all of that turns up in miniature, with the basin, the tap holes and a splash return crowded into a few hundred millimetres of stone. Small enough to carry, awkward enough to plan.

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. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. A join in a long run wants to sit away from the rooflight, because a seam under direct downlight shows in a way the same seam under a wall cupboard never does. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A double vanity is nested like a worktop, not like an offcut.

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. Where a side return has been infilled, the join between old brick and new blockwork lands mid-run and the two faces are never in one plane. Either way the walls are thin, the floor is boards over shallow joists and nothing meets at a right angle, so the vanity is scribed at both ends and the unit is fixed back to the wall as well as standing on the floor. Loft en-suites lose their splash return to the slope.