Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in The Wrythe

Yes. The Wrythe is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SM5. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Sutton. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. We arrive with the offcut pieces already labelled by room. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

That rear wall carries the back door and the only window, which leaves very little uninterrupted length for a sink run. The bathroom in one of these is almost never original: it is a later room over the back addition, or a bedroom divided in two. The soil stack decides the basin position more than taste does. 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. 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.

Where the hall runs straight through to the back the piece can be walked in flat, and it is only the two door frames that have to be cleared. 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 bath is usually in the way before the doorway is. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. An en-suite and a family bathroom come off the same load.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop splashbacks & upstands. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. 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. 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. Batched vanity tops are templated in one visit. 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. 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. Two basins in one room is one piece, not two.

A breakfast bar on the outer side is an overhang like any other, and the support under it is sized for people leaning on the end rather than for the weight of the stone alone. 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. One slab run, so the bathroom matches the kitchen. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

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. 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 bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats. 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. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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. A specification repeated across flats is drawn once.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The rear wall of the addition carries both the back door and the window, which leaves very little unbroken wall for a run to sit against. 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.

The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. 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. A wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. The units below stay exactly as they are; only the surface is replaced. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. No basin aperture is worth rushing for a parking bay.

If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Many have had the ground floor chimney breast removed to gain three hundred millimetres, and the gained strip is newer blockwork standing proud of the old plaster. 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. What the wall is made of decides how the unit is fixed.