Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Ruxley

Yes. Ruxley is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA14. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. 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. Two pieces and a tube of sealant is the whole delivery. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Post-war terraces have a short straight hall to the kitchen, which is a good deal kinder than the houses they replaced. The bathroom is the small room over the kitchen, and the waste already runs where it needs to, so the basin position is more or less settled before anyone draws anything. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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.

The van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. A vanity top goes wherever a person will go. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house 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. A booked window suits a bathroom better than it suits a kitchen.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop design & quotation and worktop templating. 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. 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. 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 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. Cloakrooms are the piece most often forgotten at ordering.

Peninsula tops are often the longest single piece in the kitchen, so if anything in the layout is going to force a second slab it is generally this one. 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. One template visit covers both rooms if both are ready. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. 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. Measure from the finished unit up to the underside of the window sill and send it with the basin and tap models. Residents are given written notice before anyone attends, and that notice period rather than the workshop is what governs the earliest sensible start. 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 fixed changeover date leaves no room to redrill a top.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. The units stay where they are and only the surface changes. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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. The shelves come in with the top so nobody returns for them.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. A peninsula is an island with one end tied to a run, which means the join between them has to be planned rather than allowed to happen. 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 vanity comes off what the kitchen leaves behind.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Plaster over blockwork is thin and hollow in patches, so anything fixed back to the wall needs a sound spot found first. 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. Shelves and a window board come off the same offcut.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. 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. Carried flat on a board once the aperture has been cut.