Laundry Stone Benchtop Costs NSW 2026 - Get Free Quotes

Laundry Stone Benchtop Costs in NSW

A stone bench in a NSW laundry runs $800 to $1,800 for a small one to two square metre installation and $1,200 to $2,500 for something larger. Those figures look expensive per square metre against a kitchen, and they are, for a reason that has nothing to do with the stone. Understanding it changes how you should order. It also explains why two quotes for the same small bench can differ by hundreds of dollars. One fabricator may be scheduling you into an existing run while the other is making a dedicated trip.

Every stone job carries the same fixed costs regardless of size. A slab is bought whole, a fabricator drives out to template, the workshop occupies a saw and a polishing bench, freight is arranged and a crew attends to install. None of that halves because your piece is small. The result is a practical minimum of around $2,000 to $2,500 for any standalone stone work in this state. It applies whether you are buying granite or porcelain, because the fixed costs are the same either way.

The consequence is worth stating directly. Ordering a laundry bench on its own means paying most of a minimum charge for one or two square metres of material, which is why quotes come back at figures that seem disproportionate. Nobody is overcharging you. The arithmetic simply does not favour small isolated pieces, and no amount of shopping around changes it.

Timing solves what negotiation cannot. A laundry bench ordered alongside a kitchen shares the template visit, the freight and the installation crew, and its marginal cost falls to $400 to $1,000. If a kitchen renovation is anywhere on your horizon, waiting and combining the two is the most effective saving available on this job. Even a few months of patience can halve the figure. Where the kitchen is further off than that, the offcut route is the next best option.

Offcuts sharpen that further and are worth asking about explicitly. Kitchen jobs routinely leave usable material once the benchtop pieces are cut, and a laundry bench is frequently small enough to come out of it. Some fabricators offer offcut pricing without prompting, and many more will if the question is asked. It costs nothing to ask and occasionally saves several hundred dollars.

Beyond cost, laundries have requirements no kitchen page addresses. Bleach and stain removers live in this room and both attack stone in ways that food never does. Appliances sit under the bench and vibrate, troughs are deeper and heavier than kitchen sinks, and the working height often differs because a front loader has to fit underneath.

The material question also resolves differently here. Heat is irrelevant in a laundry, appearance matters less than in a kitchen, and chemical resistance matters far more, which changes the ranking of the options considerably. Porcelain does unusually well here and marble does unusually badly. Those two facts alone shift the ranking away from what a kitchen page would tell you.

Sections below cover the work itself and the minimum charge in detail. They then run through which materials suit, laundry chemicals and stone, and working around appliances. Troughs and cutouts, heights and layout, and pricing across Sydney and regional NSW follow after that.

What the Work Covers

Quotes here cover the material, templating, cutting, edge profiling and polishing, the trough cutout and tap holes, delivery and installation with joints sealed. It is the same package as any benchtop and priced the same way. What sits outside it is worth having written down rather than assumed. On a job this small the exclusions can easily exceed the benchtop itself.

Templating waits until the cabinetry is installed, levelled and fixed, exactly as in a kitchen. Laundry joinery is frequently less precise than kitchen joinery, particularly in older NSW homes where the laundry was an afterthought. Measuring the room that exists rather than the one on a plan matters here as much as anywhere.

Fabrication takes one to three weeks depending on the workshop, and is identical in process to any other stone piece. Cutting is done wet on a bridge saw, the trough cutout is machined with rounded internal corners so stress cannot gather at a sharp angle, exposed edges are profiled and polished, and tap holes are drilled. Wet methods are a dust control duty rather than a preference, enforced by SafeWork NSW.

Installation on a laundry bench is usually quick, often under two hours. The piece is dry fitted, scribed to the walls where they are out of square, bedded on silicone and levelled, then sealed at the wall junctions. Small benches rarely need seams, which removes the most demanding part of a stone installation. A single piece also means no joint to maintain later.

Plumbing is excluded and is licensed work in NSW. Disconnecting the old trough and tapware and reconnecting the new ones is a plumber's job, typically $250 to $500 across two visits, and that sits under plumbing services. Book it around a confirmed installation date rather than a hoped for one. Plumbers charge for a wasted visit and fabricators are rarely early.

Removal of an existing benchtop is normally separate and runs $200 to $600 for a laundry. That is less than a kitchen simply because the area is smaller. Where the existing top is engineered stone it costs more, since legacy quartz must come out under dust controls with water suppression and proper disposal, as covered under stone benchtop replacement and upgrade.

Cabinetry and splashback work are also outside a benchtop quote. A laundry cupboard that has swollen around a leaking trough needs attention before new stone goes on it, and the tiled splashback behind the trough may need adjusting if the new bench is a different thickness. Joinery repairs sit under cabinet making and joinery.

The Minimum Charge and How to Avoid It

The floor of roughly $2,000 to $2,500 applies to standalone stone work across NSW and it is not negotiable in any meaningful way. Fabricators are not being difficult about it. The costs they are covering are real and are incurred before any stone is cut. A quote below that figure usually means something has been left out. Removal, the cutout or the plumbing are the usual candidates.

Bundling is the answer and the savings are substantial. A laundry bench added to a kitchen order costs $400 to $1,000 rather than $800 to $1,800, because the template visit is already happening, the freight is already booked and the crew is already coming. Nothing else you can do on this job saves as much. It is worth building the timing of your renovation around.

The list of pieces worth combining is longer than people think. A kitchen, a laundry bench, a bathroom vanity, a windowsill, a hearth, a bar top and a shelf can all go on one order. Each additional piece then costs a fraction of what it would alone. Vanities in particular pair well with a laundry order, since both are small pieces facing similar conditions. That application is covered under bathroom vanity stone benchtop installation.

Offcut pricing is the second lever and it applies specifically to small pieces. A kitchen job generates leftover material once the main pieces are cut, and a laundry bench of one or two square metres will often fit within it. Ask the fabricator whether your laundry can come from the kitchen offcut. The answer is frequently yes, and it is rarely offered unprompted.

Where no other work is planned, ask whether the yard has offcuts from someone else's job. Stone yards accumulate remnants in popular colours. Many will sell them, particularly for a piece as small as a laundry bench. You give up choice of colour and gain a substantial discount. In a room few people see, that is usually a reasonable trade.

Timing within the year makes a smaller but real difference. NSW fabrication yards run hardest through spring and early summer as renovations chase Christmas, and a small job is easier to slot in during the quieter months. Winter is generally the easiest time to get a fabricator interested in a one square metre bench. Small jobs fill gaps in a quiet schedule.

One further saving is worth raising with the fabricator directly, because it is specific to small pieces. Where a laundry bench is narrow enough, some yards will cut it from the strip of slab left over after a kitchen island or a long run has been taken out, which would otherwise go to waste. That material has already been paid for by the earlier job, so the price reflects fabrication and installation rather than the stone itself. It is not always possible, since the offcut has to be the right dimension and free of any flaw, and it costs nothing to ask. Yards that keep an organised remnant rack are the ones most likely to say yes. It is worth asking two or three.

Where none of that applies, laminate deserves genuine consideration in this room. A laundry sees less scrutiny than a kitchen, the door is usually shut, and $300 against $1,500 buys a lot elsewhere in a renovation. Both options are weighed against each other under laminate versus stone benchtop comparison.

Materials That Suit a Laundry

The fired porcelain family is the strongest technical choice here, more clearly than in a kitchen. Ranges such as Dekton, Neolith and Laminam are non porous so nothing soaks in, chemically inert so bleach and stain removers do nothing to them, and extremely hard. None of them ever needs sealing. At $900 to $1,800 per square metre they are not cheap. On a piece this small, though, the total difference against granite is a few hundred dollars rather than thousands. The material is covered in full under porcelain benchtop installation.

Granite is the value option and performs well with reasonable care. It is hard, it takes knocks from wet baskets and buckets, and the speckled patterns hide the marks a laundry generates. Being porous it wants sealing, and in this room that matters more than in a kitchen because of what gets used here. Annual attention is a fair expectation rather than the one to three years a kitchen might allow. The material itself is covered under granite benchtop installation.

Marble is a poor choice for a laundry and it is worth being blunt about it. Bleach, oxygen based stain removers and many pre wash sprays are chemically aggressive, and marble is calcite based, meaning largely calcium carbonate, so these products etch it on contact and dull the surface permanently. A room dedicated to stain removal is the worst possible home for a stone that reacts to cleaning chemicals. Beautiful as it is elsewhere, marble does not belong here.

Acrylic solid surface suits a laundry unusually well and is underused in this room. They are non porous and resist most household chemicals. Seams can be made invisible, and any damage sands out completely, which is a real advantage on a surface that takes buckets and baskets. Heat is their weakness, and a laundry rarely produces any. That removes the main objection people raise against the material.

Stainless steel is worth considering for a working laundry rather than a display one. It is non porous, entirely chemical resistant and easy to sanitise. It can also be fabricated with an integrated trough, which removes the join between bench and tub altogether. It marks into a patina rather than staying pristine. In a room built around getting things clean rather than looking clean, that suits the purpose.

Laminate remains the most common laundry benchtop in Australia and there is no shame in it. Modern high pressure laminate from ranges such as Laminex and Polytec resists water well, comes in convincing stone and timber patterns, and costs $150 to $400 per square metre against $600 or more for stone. Its weaknesses are heat, which a laundry does not generate, and water at cut edges. Good sealing at fabrication addresses the second.

Timber looks superb in a laundry and demands the most attention. It wants oiling more often here than anywhere else in the house because of the constant water, and standing water around a trough will mark it. In a laundry used lightly it is a lovely surface. In one processing five loads a week it becomes a commitment.

Laundry Chemicals and Stone

This room contains a chemistry set that no kitchen matches. It is also the most overlooked factor when people choose a laundry benchtop. Chlorine bleach, oxygen based stain removers, nappy soakers, pre wash sprays, enzyme treatments and concentrated detergents all live here, and several of them do real damage to stone surfaces.

Chlorine bleach is the most aggressive and the most commonly spilled. On marble it etches the surface immediately and permanently. On granite it strips the sealer and can dull a polished finish through repeated exposure, and on almost any natural stone it will lighten the colour if left sitting. Porcelain, sintered stone, solid surface and stainless steel are entirely unaffected. None of them will register a bleach spill at all.

Oxygen based stain removers are gentler on fabric and still hard on stone. Products of that kind are alkaline in solution and will degrade an impregnating sealer over time, which leaves the stone underneath progressively more absorbent. The damage is gradual rather than dramatic. It shows up as staining that simply would not have happened two years earlier.

Acidic products appear in laundries more often than people realise. Rust removers, some limescale treatments and vinegar based fabric softeners all etch marble and limestone on contact and attack sealers on granite. In a room where a bottle gets knocked over eventually, this matters more than it sounds. Nobody plans the spill that does the damage.

The practical response is partly material and partly habit. Choosing a chemically inert surface removes the problem entirely. Where you already have natural stone, storing bottles in a cupboard rather than standing them on the bench prevents most incidents. Wiping a spill immediately rather than after the load finishes prevents most of the rest. Thirty seconds of attention is worth more here than any product.

Sealing frequency should be higher in a laundry than a kitchen if the surface is natural stone. Annually is a reasonable working interval, and the test is unchanged: leave water on the surface for five minutes, wipe it off, and reseal if the stone darkened where it sat. Impregnating sealers from Lithofin, Aqua Mix and Dry Treat are stocked by NSW stone and tile suppliers. The area around the trough always wears first. Test that zone rather than the middle of the bench.

Where damage has already occurred, most of it is recoverable on natural stone. Etch marks are polished out, stains are drawn back with a poultice, which is an absorbent paste left on the mark for a day or two, and a dulled surface can be repolished, all of which sits under stone benchtop repairs and polishing. That optionality is one of the arguments for stone over laminate in a room that takes chemical abuse.

Working Around Washers and Dryers

The most consequential decision in a laundry layout is whether appliances go under the bench, and it is settled by the machine rather than the joinery. A front loading washing machine fits under a benchtop because it opens forward. A top loader does not, because the lid needs clear space above it, and no amount of design solves that.

Anyone planning a continuous bench should confirm the machine first, before a single cabinet is ordered. Replacing a top loader with a front loader is a common part of a laundry renovation for exactly this reason, and discovering the incompatibility after the cabinetry is built is an expensive way to learn it. Measure the actual appliance rather than trusting a general figure. Models vary by thirty or forty millimetres and the tolerance matters.

Height follows from the appliance and is the number most often got wrong. Front loaders commonly stand around eight hundred and fifty millimetres, and they need clearance above for the bench, its support and a little tolerance, which typically puts a laundry bench at nine hundred to nine hundred and fifty millimetres. That is often slightly higher than a kitchen bench. It is worth settling before the joinery is made rather than afterwards.

Vibration is the laundry specific problem that no kitchen has. A washing machine on a spin cycle transmits real energy into anything touching it. A benchtop resting on or too close to the machine will buzz, shift over time and stress its own fixings. A small air gap above the appliance resolves most of it. The support should also be taken by the cabinetry rather than by the machine itself.

Spans over appliances need support designed in rather than assumed. A benchtop crossing a six hundred millimetre appliance opening has nothing beneath it at that point, so a rail or steel flat bar across the opening carries the load. Twenty millimetre granite weighs around fifty five kilograms per square metre. That is not a load to leave unsupported over a gap, however short the span looks.

Stacked appliances change the calculation entirely and often for the better. A dryer mounted above a front loader in a stacking kit frees the entire remaining run for bench. In a small NSW laundry that can be the difference between a usable folding surface and none at all. Wall mounted dryers achieve something similar. Either arrangement is worth considering before the cabinetry is designed.

Access for servicing deserves a thought that people skip. A washing machine will eventually need pulling out, and a bench that traps it behind a fixed panel or a tight cabinet turns a simple repair into a demolition job. Leaving the appliance able to slide forward is worth a few millimetres of design. Your future self will appreciate it.

Electrical outlets need positioning before the bench goes on, and it is easily forgotten in a laundry. A washing machine, a dryer and often an iron or a steamer all want power, and outlets sitting behind an appliance are unreachable once everything is pushed back into place. Positioning them above bench height on the splashback wall, or in the side of a cabinet, solves it. Any new circuit is licensed work for an electrician rather than something to improvise. Getting this settled at joinery stage costs nothing. Fixing it afterwards means cutting into a finished wall.

Ventilation matters where a condenser or vented dryer sits under the bench. Vented models need a duct run and a clear path to the outside. An enclosed cabinet with no airflow shortens the life of any dryer, so the joinery has to allow for it. That coordination sits alongside kitchen electrical costs if new circuits are involved.

Troughs, Tubs and Cutouts

Laundry troughs are deeper and heavier than kitchen sinks and the cutout has to account for it. A standard Australian laundry tub holds around forty five litres, which is a substantial weight of water once filled. A tub full of soaking washing is heavier again. That load has to be carried by the cabinetry rather than by the stone alone. A tub sitting on its rim with nothing beneath it is a problem waiting to happen.

Drop in troughs sit in the cutout with a rim resting on the bench, and they are the cheaper and more forgiving option at $150 to $250 for the cutout. The rim covers any imperfection in the cut edge, and the tub can be replaced later without touching the benchtop. The rim also collects lint and detergent residue, which is the trade off. In a laundry that residue accumulates faster than you would expect.

Undermount troughs are bonded beneath the stone with the cut edge polished as a finished surface, at $250 to $350. The advantage is real in a laundry. Water and lint can be swept straight off the bench into the tub with nothing to catch on, which matters more here than it does in a kitchen. Cost is higher and replacing the tub later is a bigger job. For most households the daily convenience outweighs both.

Integrated cabinet tubs are a common Australian arrangement and change the question. Many laundry units come as a tub already built into a cabinet, in which case the stone runs beside it rather than around it, and there is no cutout at all. That is the cheapest configuration and often the most practical in a small space. It also removes the failure point a cutout creates.

Tap holes are drilled at fabrication and cost $40 to $100 each. Decide the tapware before templating, because a laundry mixer, a separate hot and cold set and a wall mounted tap all require different arrangements. Drilling stone on site afterwards is possible but never as clean.

Cutout corners must be radiused rather than square, exactly as in a kitchen. A sharp internal corner concentrates stress and is where a crack starts, particularly in a room where a heavy tub is repeatedly filled and drained. A fabricator machining square corners is doing it wrong. Radiused corners are standard practice for a reason.

Sealing around the trough is what determines how long the cabinetry underneath survives. A neat silicone bead at the junction, kept intact and renewed every few years, is the difference between a dry cupboard and a swollen carcass. Inspecting it once a year takes a minute. This is the most common failure point in any laundry. It also costs almost nothing to prevent, which makes the neglect harder to explain.

Heights, Overhangs and Layout

Bench height in a laundry is driven by appliances rather than by ergonomics, which sets it apart from every other room. Nine hundred to nine hundred and fifty millimetres is typical where a front loader sits underneath, against nine hundred as the kitchen standard. Where no appliance goes underneath, you have complete freedom. Setting the height to suit the people using the room is worth doing deliberately.

Folding space is the functional payoff of a laundry bench and is worth designing for deliberately. A continuous run of at least a metre gives somewhere to sort and fold, which is the thing most Australian laundries lack. That alone is why a bench over the appliances is worth the effort of getting the heights right.

Depth usually matches kitchen cabinetry at six hundred millimetres and occasionally needs more. Front loading machines are commonly around six hundred deep plus hoses and connections behind, which can push the cabinetry out to six hundred and fifty or seven hundred, and the benchtop follows the cabinetry. Measure the appliance with its plumbing in place. Hoses take up more room than the specification sheet suggests.

Overhang beyond the cabinet face is generally minimal in a laundry. Ten to twenty millimetres gives a clean shadow line and keeps drips off the doors, and larger overhangs are rarely useful in a room this size. Anything substantial needs support, exactly as it would elsewhere in the house.

An upstand along the back wall is worth considering instead of tiling. An upstand is a short vertical strip of the same stone running up the wall behind the bench, and at thirty to fifty millimetres it costs $80 to $200 per lineal metre. It seals the wall junction cleanly and avoids a grout line that will eventually discolour. Where a full splashback is wanted, that sits under kitchen splashback installation.

Waterproofing beneath and behind everything is a building requirement rather than a benchtop one. Laundries are wet areas, and the waterproofing standards that apply to them are published by Standards Australia and referenced through the building code. Any renovation touching the floor or wall linings needs that considered before the joinery goes back in. It is a builder's responsibility rather than a fabricator's.

Storage above and around the bench deserves planning at the same time as the surface. Overhead cupboards keep detergents and chemicals off the benchtop entirely, which removes the main threat to a natural stone surface in this room, and a shallow shelf at the back of the bench does something similar for the things in daily use. A pull out basket drawer under the bench is worth more in a laundry than almost any other storage. None of this is benchtop work, though all of it interacts with where the bench can go and how deep it needs to be. Sorting it before the joinery is built produces a much better room. Adding it afterwards rarely works as well.

Small NSW laundries and apartment euro laundries deserve their own thinking. Where the entire space is a cupboard containing a stacked washer and dryer, a bench is often impossible and a narrow shelf is the realistic ambition. In those cases the money is usually better spent elsewhere. A broader approach to the renovation sits under kitchen renovation.

What Affects the Cost

Whether the piece is ordered alone or bundled is the dominant factor and dwarfs everything else. Standalone means absorbing most of a $2,000 to $2,500 minimum. Adding the same piece to a kitchen order brings it to $400 to $1,000 for identical stone. No other decision on this job moves the number as far.

Your material choice sets the band within that. Granite at $600 to $1,200 per square metre installed sits below porcelain at $900 to $1,800. On a one or two square metre piece the absolute difference is a few hundred dollars rather than thousands, which makes the better material easier to justify here than in a kitchen.

The trough arrangement moves things next. An integrated cabinet tub needs no cutout at all, while a drop in costs $150 to $250 and an undermount $250 to $350. On a job this small, that configuration choice has a real effect on the total.

Area matters less than people expect because of the fixed cost floor. Going from one square metre to two adds material but very little else, so a larger laundry bench is disproportionately better value than a small one. Extending the bench over the appliances often costs less than the extra square metre suggests. It is usually the best value decision available on this job.

Edge profile and thickness behave as they do anywhere. Twenty millimetres with a pencil edge is the baseline, and a mitred forty millimetre edge adds material and skilled hours. In a laundry the visual case for the thicker edge is weaker than in a kitchen.

Access is usually simple for a laundry and occasionally not. Ground floor laundries with external doors are the easy case, and most NSW laundries fall into it. A laundry on an upper floor or in an apartment brings the same lift bookings and carry as any other stone piece, spread across a much smaller job.

Removal and plumbing sit outside the benchtop price and apply either way. Taking out an existing top runs $200 to $600 for a laundry, and disconnecting and reconnecting the trough and tapware runs $250 to $500 across two plumber visits. Workplace duties covering stone fabrication are administered by SafeWork NSW.

Laundry Benchtop Costs Across Sydney

Pricing is consistent across the metropolitan area because the minimum charge dominates everything on a job this size. What differs is the laundry itself. Newer homes through the north west and south west have purpose built laundries with room for a full bench. Apartments and older inner suburb terraces frequently have a cupboard or a narrow galley where a bench is barely possible.

The bottom of every Sydney range assumes the bench is bundled with other work, and the top assumes it is ordered on its own. That difference is larger than anything separating one suburb from another, which is why the timing of the order matters more than where you live. Apartment owners should factor in that a small stone piece still requires the same lift booking and strata notification as a kitchen island, and some buildings will not distinguish between the two.

Laundry Benchtop Costs in Regional NSW

Freight is the regional factor and it hits small jobs hardest of all. A delivery charge of $150 to $600 spread across a one square metre laundry bench is proportionally enormous, where the same charge across a full kitchen barely registers. Combining pieces into one delivery is therefore even more valuable outside the metropolitan area than within it. Ask whether the yard already runs deliveries through your district.

Offcut buying works particularly well in regional yards and is worth asking about directly. Smaller operations accumulate remnants they would rather move than store, and a laundry bench is exactly the size those pieces suit. Colour choice is limited to what is on hand. Few people mind that in a room with the door usually shut.

Manufactured materials suit regional orders better than natural stone for a small piece. Porcelain, sintered stone, solid surface and laminate are made to consistent patterns, so ordering from a sample is reliable and there is no need to drive to a metropolitan yard to inspect a slab. For a laundry bench that saving in time is worth more than the colour choice you give up.

Rural laundries tend to be larger and to work harder than metropolitan ones. Farm and rural households process work clothes, boots and seriously dirty washing, which argues for chemical resistance, a deep trough and a surface that takes knocks. Porcelain and stainless steel both suit that brief better than a polished natural stone. Neither will register the treatment a working rural laundry gives it.

Households on tank or bore water have one extra consideration. Bore supply through parts of the Central West and the Riverina carries mineral content. That leaves deposits around a trough and tap over time. The correct removal method on natural stone is a specialist product rather than a supermarket descaler, which will strip the sealer.

What to Look Out For

Ask about bundling before you accept a standalone price. Any fabricator quoting a laundry bench in isolation should be told whether other stone work is planned. The difference between $1,500 and $600 for the same piece comes down entirely to whether it shares a template visit and a delivery.

Query a quote that seems unusually low for a small standalone job. A price well under the $2,000 to $2,500 floor usually means something has been excluded. Removal, the cutout and the plumbing are the usual candidates, and those costs reappear later. Ask for the exclusions in writing.

Rule out marble in this room unless the laundry is purely decorative. Bleach and oxygen stain removers etch calcite based stone permanently and instantly. A room devoted to stain removal is the worst place in the house for a surface that reacts to cleaning products.

Confirm the washing machine type before any cabinetry is built. A top loader cannot sit under a continuous bench, because the lid opens upward. This gets discovered too late often enough to be worth checking twice. Measure the actual appliance with its hoses connected.

Check that any span over an appliance opening has support designed into it. A benchtop crossing a six hundred millimetre gap needs a rail or flat bar carrying the load. Vibration from a spin cycle makes that more important here than in a kitchen, not less.

Make sure the silicone bead around the trough is part of the job and done properly. Water getting past that junction is the most common cause of a swollen laundry cupboard in NSW homes. It is easily prevented at installation. Repairing it afterwards costs considerably more.

Finally, treat any offer of engineered stone as a warning sign. The prohibition on manufacture, supply, processing and installation has applied nationally since 1 July 2024 and covers every application including a laundry. The trader register and licensing rules sit with NSW Fair Trading. Unresolved disputes may be taken to NCAT, and broader guidance is available through Service NSW.

What to Look for in a Quote in NSW

A useful quote names the material and thickness, states the finish and edge profile, and specifies the trough type and cutout. It should list the tap holes and give one total for supply, fabrication, delivery and installation. It also needs to state plainly whether removal and plumbing are included, since on a job this small those items are a large share of the total.

Tell every fabricator what else you are planning, which is the most important thing you can do here. If a kitchen, a vanity or any other stone work is coming in the next year, say so at enquiry stage. A fabricator who knows will often quote the laundry as an add on rather than a standalone job, even where the timing is not yet fixed.

Send the same information to everyone quoting. Measurements of the run, photographs of the space including the existing trough and appliances, the trough model, the tapware and a note on whether a washing machine sits under the bench. Different assumptions about the appliance produce quite different quotes.

Four questions settle most of it quickly. Can this come from an offcut, what would it cost bundled with other work, is the trough cutout included, and who is arranging the plumber. Those answers usually explain any gap between two quotes on the same bench.

Weigh the total scope rather than the headline number on a job this small. A quote covering removal, the cutout and a coordinated plumber is worth considerably more than a bare benchtop price with three items waiting outside it. Posting the job on The Quote Yard puts the same brief in front of several NSW fabricators, and the full cost picture across every room sits under kitchen benchtop costs. Guarantees covering the material and the installation work are set out by the ACCC.