Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Walworth

Yes. Walworth is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE17. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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. One trip in with the top, the shelves and the adhesive. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

There is no back addition on these, so the kitchen is the original rear room and the run is one wall long with a door at each end of it. 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 bathroom in a house like this is rarely where it started. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Where the wall bows, the splash return is scribed to follow it.

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 red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. 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.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop installation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone 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 small tops nest better than one large one. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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 mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. 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. Two rooms, one batch, one delivery. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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 basin cannot be moved to suit a wall that is out of true. 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. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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. Nothing in a vanity quote is bundled into the kitchen.

Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. 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 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. Boarded floors give, and a vanity shows it at the tile line.

Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. A picture rail, a deep skirting and a moulded architrave all sit in the way of anything that assumes flat wall from floor to ceiling. 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. One visit, sitting between two plumbing visits.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. 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. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A vanity is nested last and cut from what is left.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. 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. Where a bedroom has been divided to make a bathroom the window sits off centre to the new room and the vanity ends up under it, which puts the window board in the order rather than outside it. A rear addition bathroom is cold, narrow and full of pipework.