Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Shooters Hill

Yes. Shooters Hill 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. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. 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. A booked window suits a bathroom better than it suits a kitchen. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Original joinery is deep and stands proud of the plaster, so the run is plotted to the units rather than to the wall behind them. Bathrooms in houses this size are big enough for a double vanity, and a top with two basins and several tap holes is a worktop by any other measure. The soil stack decides the basin position more than taste does. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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.

A loading bay or a red route puts a clock on the unload, so the pieces come off in the order they will be fitted rather than the order they were loaded. 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. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The shelves come in with the top so nobody returns for them.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop design & quotation and worktop fabrication. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. 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. Cloakrooms are the piece most often forgotten at ordering. 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. 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. Repeat bathrooms come cheaper per top, not per square metre.

Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. 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. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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. The tile joint behind is what shows a top that is not level. Send the unit layout for every bathroom at once with the basin and tap models against each, so the slab can be nested for all of them. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. 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.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. The units below stay exactly as they are; only the surface is replaced. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. 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 vanity delivery is minutes at the kerb, not hours.

Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. 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.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. 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. A curved bay or a canted corner turns up more often here than people expect, and a curve is templated and cut, never bent. 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 same stone as the kitchen, in a narrower cut.

What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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 stud wall takes a vanity only once there is timber behind it.