Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in South Bermondsey

Yes. South Bermondsey is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE16. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Where a road is shut for filming or for works the diversion adds distance to the carry even when parking itself was never the problem. 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. Everything the bathroom needs comes off the van at once. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Front doors off the deck open into a lobby barely wider than the door itself, and the turn out of it is a right angle. Bathrooms in this stock are compact, squarely built and take a short vanity that will come out of almost any offcut, which makes them among the cheapest bathroom tops we cut. Where the floor is solid, the unit sits where it is put. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled.

Blankets on the walls and a board on the floor go in before the first piece, because a scratched car becomes a bill from the managing agent long after the kitchen is finished. 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. Small pieces still get crated, because small pieces get dropped. Streets near a ground or a venue have restrictions that come and go with the fixture list rather than with the time of day. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A cloakroom top is a single armful off the tail lift.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. 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. Several small tops nest better than one large one. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. 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. The vanity comes off what the kitchen leaves behind. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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 pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. 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. Whoever signs it off is whoever chooses the basin.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. 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. One slab run, so the bathroom matches the kitchen.

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. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. A good number of these blocks are large panel system builds, where the wall is a precast unit with a grouted joint and nothing gets cut into it. 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.

A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. 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. Lift doors close on a timer that takes no account of somebody holding a worktop, so a pair of hands stays on the buttons at each end. 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 way into a bathroom ends at a door that opens inward.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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. The bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats.