Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Thamesmead

Yes. Thamesmead is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE28, SE2. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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. A vanity delivery is minutes at the kerb, not hours. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Many have been extended at the rear since being sold, so the kitchen is half original and half newer with a floor junction between the two. Bathrooms in this stock are compact, squarely built and take a short vanity that will come out of almost any offcut, which makes them among the cheapest bathroom tops we cut. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing. Where a partition has been built off the floor screed rather than off the slab, it moves, and a mitre bonded across that corner is the first thing to open. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan.

Where the lift will not take the longest run we design a join in rather than gamble, because a piece that will not go up has to go back on the van. 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 way into a bathroom ends at a door that opens inward. 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. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. One trip in with the top, the shelves and the adhesive.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. 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 small tops nest better than one large one. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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 schedule follows the plumber, not the programme.

A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. 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 sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

An unsupported overhang off a stud wall wants noggins fixed between the studs before the boarding goes on, and once it is boarded and skimmed that option has gone. 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. The scribe on a vanity is measured in depth it cannot spare. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. Where the provider has set the specification the material choice was made once for a great many kitchens, and the useful work is meeting it exactly rather than proposing something else on the day. 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 bathroom done once is worth the conversation about finish.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. The kitchen was laid out to a nineteen-sixties module, so the units in it are often 500 or 550 deep and a modern carcass does not land on the same line. 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. The stone is the simple half of a bathroom fit.

Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Whether the stone can stand on end in the car is the first question, because a lift that takes 2.1m upright takes nothing like that lying flat. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. A splash return travels with the top it belongs to.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. 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. 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. The van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does.

An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. The kitchen has a door to the hall, a door to the garden and a window over the sink, so the continuous run is short in every direction. The complication is the service riser boxed into a corner: the top is notched round it with a radiused internal corner, never a square one, and the notch is machined at the works from a measurement taken at the finished face. Stud partitions want noggins before a wall-hung unit goes up.