Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in St Johns

Yes. St Johns is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE8, SE4. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. 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 bathroom pieces come off last and go in first. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

The original scullery gully is still live in the yard outside the back door, and new waste from the sink joins a drain laid for a copper and a stone sink. 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. Square rooms make short work of a vanity template. 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. 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 stud wall takes a vanity only once there is timber behind it.

Everything comes through the front door and down the hall, so the tightest point on the route is usually the newel post at the foot of the stairs. 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 landing turn matters more than the front door for a bathroom. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A vanity fit ends before most parking restrictions do.

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 templating 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. 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. A converted house needs a vanity on every floor. 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. 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 is decided late and the offcut has usually gone.

A join in a long run wants to sit away from the rooflight, because a seam under direct downlight shows in a way the same seam under a wall cupboard never does. 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 cloakroom top is the easiest piece on any nesting plan. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

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. 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. Nothing in a bathroom is square, and the top has to be. 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. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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. Owner bathrooms get the slab viewed; let ones get the sample.

Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. A narrow entrance hall with a turn into the back of the house caps the longest piece we can physically get in, whatever the run itself measures. 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. An en-suite off a bedroom adds a second flight, not a second job.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. The wall between the original room and the return usually carries a steel, and the plaster line above it steps, so anything full height behind the run is measured separately from the top. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Yield is why a vanity in a rare stone is still affordable.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. 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. 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 low window over the basin caps the splash return.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. The rear door swings inward across the end of the run, so the last few hundred millimetres of worktop are only reachable with the door shut. 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. A large bathroom is where a double vanity becomes possible.