Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Tooting

Yes. Tooting is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW17. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. Loading concessions differ from one zone to the next rather than following a single national rule, so what applied on the last job proves nothing about this one. 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 fit ends before most parking restrictions do. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The ground floor is a solid slab with a bitumen membrane and no void under it, so services either run on the surface or get chased into something hard. 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. 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. 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.

Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. 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 vanity top goes wherever a person will go. A van waiting on a loading concession has somebody standing with it, because a vehicle left unattended is the one that collects the ticket. 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 plumber and the van rarely want the street on the same day.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. A family adding a self-contained unit is paying for the whole conversion, and the worktop is one line in a much longer job. 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. Several small tops nest better than one large one. Where several adults share the cooking the kitchen is in use most of the day, so a fitting slot has to be agreed with more people than usual. 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. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme.

A peninsula is an island with one end tied to a run, which means the join between them has to be planned rather than allowed to happen. 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. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

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. 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 cloakroom under a stair slope limits the tap before the top. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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. Wall-hung units suit a bathroom somebody else cleans.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. 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. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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. What is behind the plaster decides how a vanity is fixed.

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. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Copper pipework is clipped along the top of the skirting rather than buried in many of these, and it holds the carcasses off the wall by a few millimetres. 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.

The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Controlled hours that end in the middle of the afternoon make the second half of the day easy and put the whole problem in the first half. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. Two pieces and a tube of sealant is the whole delivery.

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. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. These kitchens give three metres of usable wall and no more, so a dimension out by a few millimetres costs a whole run rather than a piece. A vanity top is where all of that turns up in miniature, with the basin, the tap holes and a splash return crowded into a few hundred millimetres of stone. The stone is the simple half of a bathroom fit.