Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Collier Row

Yes. Collier Row is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM5. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. 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. Everything the bathroom needs comes off the van at once. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

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. The soil stack decides the basin position more than taste does. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. What is behind the plaster decides how a vanity is fixed.

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. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. The landing turn matters more than the front door for a bathroom. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A cloakroom top is a single armful off the tail lift.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop design & quotation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Small kitchens in a shared house are all short runs and tight cut-out spacing, which is more bench work per square metre than one large kitchen would be. 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. Batched vanity tops are templated in one visit. Batching several kitchens together is the one situation where buying a whole slab is cheaper per kitchen rather than more expensive. 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. Two basins in one room is one piece, not two.

A peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. 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. The bathroom order is cheapest while the kitchen is still open. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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 top follows the unit, and the unit follows a level. Measure from the finished unit up to the underside of the window sill and send it with the basin and tap models. An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. 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. An agent sees the vanity line and asks about tiling instead.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. 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. What the route really decides for a bathroom is the shelving and the window board, since long thin pieces are the ones that break when they are twisted round a turn. An en-suite off a bedroom adds a second flight, not a second job.

An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. 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. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A cloakroom top is the easiest piece on any nesting plan.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Units are often only 500mm deep, so a standard 600mm stone top overhangs at the front and the doors need checking against it. 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.

Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. 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. Where the kitchen swallows the whole slab there is no offcut worth having, and the vanity then has to be priced against material bought for itself. Yield is why a vanity in a rare stone is still affordable.