Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Streatham Vale

Yes. Streatham Vale 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. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. 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 shelves come in with the top so nobody returns for them. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The original kitchen was a working room with a scullery and a pantry off it, so what is now one space was two or three with brick walls between them. The original bathroom in these houses is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against a wall at each end, so both ends are scribed and there is no tolerance left between them. A rear addition bathroom is cold, narrow and full of pipework. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one.

A side gate hung to open outward against a fence post is narrower in use than it measures, and lifting the gate off its hinges is usually the quickest win on the route. 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. The turn at the head of the stairs decides a double vanity. On a drive that only takes one vehicle nose-in, the van has to reverse the whole length of it to get back out, which decides which way it goes in. 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 delivery is minutes at the kerb, not hours.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. 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. 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. 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. 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. Batched vanity tops are templated in one visit.

One leg of an L is nearly always the working run and the other little more than a landing space, but both are templated, cut and edged to the same standard. 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 runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over 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. The bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats. Settle the tiling height and the basin model first, and let us know whether the unit is standing on the floor or hanging off the wall. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. 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. Marble on a vanity marks, and that is said before it is cut.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Where the knock-through has taken in a rear bay, the far end of the room is three faces of window with no usable wall left at all. Half-tiled walls are the norm, and the tile line is what the splash return has to meet, which is a decision taken before machining rather than discovered afterwards. Older walls give a vanity nothing straight to sit against.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. The chimney breast in the kitchen once took a copper or a back boiler, and whatever is left of it is rarely square to the rest of the room. 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. Small enough to carry, awkward enough to plan.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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 wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. 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.