Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Woodside

Yes. Woodside is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE25. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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 bathroom pieces come off last and go in first. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

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. 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. High ceilings do nothing for a vanity, but the reveals do. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through 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.

A handrail that has to come off before a piece will pass is twenty minutes at the start of the day, and it goes back on the wall before we leave. 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. Two hands to a shelf, four to a double vanity. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A vanity fit ends before most parking restrictions do.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands 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. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. 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. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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 building turned over floor by floor needs the batch held.

The joint where a peninsula meets the main run wants a gable directly under it, and where the units do not offer one, steel goes in to carry that joint instead. 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. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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. The waste position is fixed before the aperture is drawn. 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. Durability wins in a let bathroom, and it should.

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. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. 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. 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. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. 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. 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.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Built-in stores and a fuel place beside the back door were standard, and one of them is usually still sitting in the corner of the kitchen. Bathrooms in these flats are compact and squarely built, and take a short vanity that comes out of almost any offcut. A pod bathroom inside a shell has walls built last week.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. The floor is a concrete slab screeded before the units existed, so it falls slightly and consistently towards the back door. The service riser is boxed into a corner of the room, and the top is notched round it with a radiused internal corner rather than a square one. The window over the basin is the one the top answers to.