Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Aldborough Hatch

Yes. Aldborough Hatch is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are IG2. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Redbridge. 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. 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. A second visit for a splash return is one we would rather avoid. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These were built on a solid ground floor slab, so nothing bounces and nothing can be packed down, only up. The bathroom is the small room over the kitchen, and the waste already runs where it needs to, so the basin position is more or less settled before anyone draws anything. Loft en-suites lose their splash return to the slope. A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The top follows the unit, and the unit follows a level.

A loading bay or a red route puts a clock on the unload, so the pieces come off in the order they will be fitted rather than the order they were loaded. 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 staircase is the last stage of every bathroom carry. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Short jobs suffer most from a van that has to move.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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. 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. A building turned over floor by floor needs the batch held. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. One drawing per bathroom, however alike they look.

Three runs means two internal corners, and each corner is a decision about mitre or butt joint before anything is nested. 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 bathrooms nest better together than either does alone. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. 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 shelf in a shower niche is scribed on three sides. Measure from the finished unit up to the underside of the window sill and send it with the basin and tap models. Owner-occupied kitchens are usually being done once, which is why the edge profile, the vein direction and where a join falls are worth the conversation. 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. Whoever signs it off is whoever chooses the basin.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. 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. Where the sill lands inside the height an upstand would occupy there is no upstand, and the stone either dies into the reveal or stops short of it. 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. A vanity has no depth to give away to a scribe.

Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Casement handles and stays swing down into the space above the worktop, so the clearance that counts is the one measured with the window open. 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. The unit is packed level before the top goes near it.

Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. The van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. 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 cut top is weaker than an uncut one, so it travels differently.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A U shape uses more linear metres than people expect, and the two returns rarely nest together, so a second slab is a genuine possibility. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The waste from a basin aperture is what a shelf is cut from.