Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Woolwich

Yes. Woolwich is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE18. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone 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. The van moves on. The fitter stays with the vanity. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Rear rooms of this date have a wide sash or a pair of garden doors, so a good deal of the wall the run wants is glass. 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. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A sloping floor is corrected under the unit, not under the stone.

A goods lift booked by the hour puts a clock on the whole delivery, so pieces go up in a planned order and nothing is handled twice. 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 turn at the head of the stairs decides a double vanity. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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. Ordered with the kitchen, the bathroom costs no extra journey.

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 templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. 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. 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. Shared houses want quartz vanities and no sealing regime. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. Where every bathroom matches, one slab covers the building.

Peninsula tops are often the longest single piece in the kitchen, so if anything in the layout is going to force a second slab it is generally this one. 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 a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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 tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled. 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. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. 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.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. 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. The bridge of stone behind the basin is the part that matters.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. 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. 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. 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. Internal walls are lath on timber studs while the flank walls are brick, so two walls in the same kitchen take a fixing completely differently. 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. A bathroom over a kitchen has its waste run already decided.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. The free end is what needs deciding early: square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall to the floor, and a waterfall is cut in sequence off the same part of the slab. A narrow top nests into waste a kitchen cut list would otherwise throw away, which makes it the cheapest stone in the job. Where the kitchen eats the slab, the bathroom buys its own.