Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in South Norwood

Yes. South Norwood is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE25. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. 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. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A two-up two-down has a kitchen that was never designed to be one, so the run is short, the ceiling is low and every millimetre of depth gets argued over. The bathroom in one of these is almost never original: it is a later room over the back addition, or a bedroom divided in two. A separate WC becomes a cloakroom with a very small top. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The waste position is fixed before the aperture is drawn.

Where the turn inside is tight the piece gets turned on the path and brought in already on edge, which needs room in front of the door as well as behind it. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. A double vanity is a worktop as far as the carry is concerned. A permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole morning. 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. No basin aperture is worth rushing for a parking bay.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop replacement. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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. Repeat bathrooms come cheaper per top, not per square metre. 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. 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. A converted house needs a vanity on every floor.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. 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. A vanity is nested last and cut from what is left. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one. Have the vanity unit fixed and levelled, and the basin and tap on site, before the templater arrives, and tell us what is inside any boxing. Access is arranged through a managing agent or a scheme office rather than with the household directly, so a date gets confirmed once in writing and moving it costs a fortnight. 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. Nothing in a vanity quote is bundled into the kitchen.

Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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. Half-tiled walls leave a line the top has to meet.

Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Cottage terraces have no hall to speak of and the front door opens almost straight into the room, which makes the carry easier and the protection harder. Either way the walls are thin, the floor is boards over shallow joists and nothing meets at a right angle, so the vanity is scribed at both ends and the unit is fixed back to the wall as well as standing on the floor. Old pipework is boxed rather than moved, and the top notches round it.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. 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 cloakroom under a stair slope limits the tap before the top.

Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Sash windows sit low in the rear wall, and the sill often lands below the height a worktop wants to run past. 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 aperture is polished because you look straight down into it.