Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Streatham Common

Yes. Streatham Common is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW16. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. 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. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Edwardian terraces are wider and taller than the Victorian houses next to them, so the kitchen usually takes a full-width rear room rather than a narrow outrigger. 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. Older walls give a vanity nothing straight to sit against. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one.

A front path with a gate and a turn or two adds handling before the door is even reached, and every handling movement is another chance to catch a corner. 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. An en-suite off a bedroom adds a second flight, not a second job. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. 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. 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. The bathroom is decided late and the offcut has usually gone. 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. 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. Batched vanity tops are templated in one visit.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. 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. Where the kitchen eats the slab, the bathroom buys its own. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

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. 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. Half-tiled walls leave a line the top has to meet. 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. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. 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. Toiletries do more to a bathroom top than water ever will.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Ceilings are generous and the rooms are narrow, so the runs are long, the aisle is tight and there is nowhere to stand a slab on edge. 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. A bathroom top is drawn from the fitted unit, never from a plan.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Suspended timber floors flex underfoot, and anything that moves beneath a unit shows up later as a lipped join. A vanity top is where all of that turns up in miniature, with the basin, the tap holes and a splash return crowded into a few hundred millimetres of stone. Bathrooms take the same slab and roughly half the width.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. The units stay where they are and only the surface changes. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. No basin aperture is worth rushing for a parking bay.

Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The thickness follows the kitchen unless you ask otherwise.