Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Selsdon

Yes. Selsdon is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR2. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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 work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The larder had a cold shelf and an air brick straight through to the outside, and that brick is usually still open behind whatever now stands in front of it. The original bathroom in these houses is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against a wall at each end, so both ends are scribed and there is no tolerance left between them. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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.

The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. 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. Carried flat on a board once the aperture has been cut. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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 booked window suits a bathroom better than it suits a kitchen.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop templating. 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. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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 budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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.

Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. 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. Offcut stock is the cheapest stone a vanity will ever sit on. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. 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. Settle the tiling height and the basin model first, and let us know whether the unit is standing on the floor or hanging off the wall. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. 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 tap is bought before the top is drilled, whoever buys it.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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 basin cannot be moved to suit a wall that is out of true.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The extension slab was poured to its own level, so there is a lip or a ramp where the new floor meets the original one. 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. The tap decides the drilling, so the tap is settled first.

The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. The shelves come in with the top so nobody returns for them.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A pop-up socket in the surface is one more cut-out through the full thickness, and it wants the same clear space beneath it that a sink does. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Two rooms, one batch, one delivery.