Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Westcombe Park

Yes. Westcombe Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE3, SE10. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. 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. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The rear wall is usually a single brick thick and has been rendered, patched and re-rendered, so it bows in and out along the length of the 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. Old pipework is boxed rather than moved, and the top notches round it. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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.

A Victorian hall arch sits lower than the ceiling either side of it, and it is the point a piece carried on edge meets first. 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. A vanity top is lifted once and set down once. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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. A bathroom slot is booked short and kept short.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop fabrication and worktop design & quotation. 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. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. A repeated top is still drilled to the taps actually bought. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. A rear addition adds a cloakroom before it adds anything else.

It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. 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. A double vanity is nested like a worktop, not like an offcut. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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 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. 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. Honed stone in a bathroom asks more of whoever cleans it.

Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. There is usually a step down into the back addition, so the kitchen floor and the hall floor are not the same level and neither of them is flat. 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 window reveal in a bathroom is stone as much as the vanity is.

Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Deep original skirting is often left in behind the units, standing them off the wall, so the back edge of the stone is plotted where the carcasses actually sit. 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.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. A meter cupboard set into the hall wall narrows the run at exactly the height a carried piece travels. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Loft en-suites arrive up the tightest flight in the house.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. These were built late enough to have a damp course and proper footings, so the front of the house is close to true and the rear addition holding the kitchen is the part that has dropped. 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.