Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Streatham Hill

Yes. Streatham Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW2. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. 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 van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

External walls are thick and the run under the window sits in a deep reveal that has to be templated rather than assumed square. A bathroom in a block like this was usually carved out of a larger room, so the proportions are odd, the ceiling is high and the window reveals are deep enough to be worth cutting in stone. Old pipework is boxed rather than moved, and the top notches round it. 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. 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.

The lift is only part of the route, and the corridor from the lobby to the flat door often holds a tighter turn than the car does. 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. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A bathroom slot is booked short and kept short.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop templating. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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. Shared houses want quartz vanities and no sealing regime. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. 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. Where every bathroom matches, one slab covers the building.

Older houses put the boiler or the meter on one of the two walls, and whatever is boxed in around it sets the point where that run has to stop. 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 double vanity is nested like a worktop, not like an offcut. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

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 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 pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one. Confirm the block working hours and any porter sign-in, and have the plumber agree the waste position before we template. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. 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 same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. These kitchens were service rooms once, so they are long, narrow and further from the entrance than the floor plan suggests. 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 window reveal in a bathroom is stone as much as the vanity is.

A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Shelves and a window board come out of the same corner of the slab.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Where a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. 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. Everything the bathroom needs comes off the van at once.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. The communal stair is stone with a cast iron balustrade, and the winders leave very little room to turn a long piece. None of it changes the material, but it does decide whether the top comes out of offcut stock or wants a slab bought for it alone. The bridge of stone behind the basin is the part that matters.