Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Sutton

Yes. Sutton is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SM1, SM2. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of the borough. 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 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. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

A two-up two-down has a kitchen that was never designed to be one, so the run is short, the ceiling is low and every millimetre of depth gets argued over. 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. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Nothing in a bathroom is square, and the top has to be.

Where a basement car park is the only way up from the parking level the carry starts below ground, and two lifts in one building rarely share the same internal dimensions. 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. Small pieces still get crated, because small pieces get dropped. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. 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.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Housings and integrated appliances are set out for a 38mm laminate top, so dropping to 20mm or 30mm stone changes the clearances and needs checking before anything is cut. 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. Several vanity tops off one slab run, or they will not match. Upgrading a builder-finish kitchen is mostly a swap, so the cost sits in the material choice rather than in the shape of the room. 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. An en-suite is the same four operations at a smaller size.

A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. 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. Shelves and a window board come out of the same corner of the slab. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

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 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 low window over the basin caps the splash return. 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. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. 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. A specification repeated across flats is drawn once.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan.

If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Handover-spec kitchens are square, plumb and predictable, which means the join count is honest and driven by run length rather than by the building. It usually means the bathroom is decided late, after the kitchen, and by then the offcut that would have suited it has gone. One tap across a building means one drilling setup.

Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Party wall settlement pulls the floor down at one side of the room, so a long run reads level at one end and not at the other. 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.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Cottage terraces have no hall to speak of and the front door opens almost straight into the room, which makes the carry easier and the protection harder. The bathroom in one of these is usually a later addition over the back kitchen, so the walls are thinner, the floor moves and a vanity has to sit level in a room that is not. The soil stack decides the basin position more than taste does.