Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in South Bank

Yes. South Bank is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE1. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. 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. The plumber and the van rarely want the street on the same day. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

A gated development controls when a van gets in, where it can stand and for how long, and none of that gets decided on the morning. Bathrooms in these are square, plumb and finished before anyone moves in, so the template is short work and the whole question becomes what the unit is fixed to. Boarded floors give, and a vanity shows it at the tile line. Where a partition has been built off the floor screed rather than off the slab, it moves, and a mitre bonded across that corner is the first thing to open. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Nothing in a bathroom is square, and the top has to be.

A car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a three-metre worktop however it is stood, and there is no trimming it on the landing. 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. A cloakroom under the stairs is a short carry into a tight room. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Two pieces and a tube of sealant is the whole delivery.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. New-build kitchens are usually smaller than the plan suggests once the appliances are in, so the usable run is shorter than the drawn run. 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. A second bathroom is worth ordering with the first. Buyers upgrading before handover work to a choices deadline set by the sales office rather than by the build programme. 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. Small tops are where a slab finally gets fully used.

It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. 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.

An unsupported overhang off a stud wall wants noggins fixed between the studs before the boarding goes on, and once it is boarded and skimmed that option has gone. 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 low window over the basin caps the splash return. Confirm the unit depth for each bathroom separately, book the lift if the building wants it booked, and have both taps on site. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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 lead time on a vanity is the lead time on a kitchen.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. 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. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Stud centres are almost never where the brackets would like to be, so fixing positions get set from the framing and the stone is designed to suit. 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. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan.

A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. The lift has to be booked and blanketed before anything moves, and that booking needs to cover the old tops coming out as well as the new stone going in. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Small pieces still get crated, because small pieces get dropped.

Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. Where the lift will not take the longest run we design a join in rather than gamble, because a piece that will not go up has to go back on the van. 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. The way into a bathroom ends at a door that opens inward.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A vanity is nested last and cut from what is left.