Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Sidcup

Yes. Sidcup is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA14, DA15. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. A controlled parking zone means either a visitor permit sorted in advance or a suspended bay, and a suspension is applied for days ahead rather than on the morning. 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. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The original kitchen was a working room with a scullery and a pantry off it, so what is now one space was two or three with brick walls between them. 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. The bathroom in a house like this is rarely where it started. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. A wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone.

A car ceiling at 2.2m sets the tallest thing that will stand in it, and the trap panel and light fitting take a slice off even that. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. The piece is carried by its long edges, never by the aperture. Permit hours are what matters, not the permit itself, because a bay that frees up at six in the evening is no use for a template at ten. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. An en-suite and a family bathroom come off the same load.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop design & quotation and worktop templating. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. 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. 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. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. Repeat bathrooms come cheaper per top, not per square metre.

Knee room under a breakfast bar is measured from the face of the cabinets rather than from the edge of the stone, so a deep apron quietly eats the depth somebody actually gets to sit in. 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. Two rooms, one batch, one delivery. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. 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. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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.

Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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.

The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. A goods lift booked by the hour puts a clock on the whole delivery, so pieces go up in a planned order and nothing is handled twice. 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. A cloakroom under the stairs is a short carry into a tight room.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Where the knock-through has taken in a rear bay, the far end of the room is three faces of window with no usable wall left at all. The original bathroom here is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against two walls, so both ends are scribed. Boarded floors give, and a vanity shows it at the tile line.

The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. The lift is only part of the route, and the corridor from the lobby to the flat door often holds a tighter turn than the car does. A top with the basin aperture already cut has very little holding it together, so it travels flat on a board rather than on edge the way a worktop does. Small pieces still get crated, because small pieces get dropped.