Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Streatham

Yes. Streatham 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. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. 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.

The front rooms sit over the shop window with a structural beam beneath them, and the floor either side of that beam is not at one level. The bathroom is the small room over the kitchen, and the waste already runs where it needs to, so the basin position is more or less settled before anyone draws anything. The bathroom in a house like this is rarely where it started. A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. 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.

There is no leaning a piece against a wall halfway up, so any flight longer than a dozen treads is planned around a rest point on a landing. 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. Offcut-sized pieces are the easiest stone in the trade to move. 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 bathroom booked on its own rarely fills a day, so it can be put into whichever part of the day the street is easiest. A bathroom slot is booked short and kept short.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting 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. The bathroom is decided late and the offcut has usually gone. 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. Batched vanity tops are templated in one visit.

Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. 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. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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. Measure from the finished unit up to the underside of the window sill and send it with the basin and tap models. 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. A let bathroom wants quartz for the same reason a let kitchen does: nothing to seal, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be briefed on. Toiletries do more to a bathroom top than water ever will.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. Pendant fittings over the stairwell and anything hung on the half-landing come down first, because a piece on edge sweeps a wider arc than the people carrying 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. Nobody carries a drilled vanity top by one end.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Floors have usually settled towards the rear, so levelling means packing the units before the stone beds down. 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 cloakroom top and an en-suite top are one job at two sizes.

The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Rear access over a flat roof or up an external stair exists in some of these, and it is worth checking before the front stair is assumed. The bathroom is the small room over the kitchen, and the waste already runs where it needs to, so the basin position is more or less settled before anyone draws it. Boarded floors give, and a vanity shows it at the tile line.

Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. A communal flight is out of use while a piece is on it, so the carry is timed so nobody is trying to pass on a half-landing. 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. A vanity top goes wherever a person will go.