Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Corbets Tey

Yes. Corbets Tey is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM14. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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.

Lime plaster over rubble moves in and out enough that a single long panel will show a gap somewhere along its length. A freestanding bath in the middle of the room pushes the vanity to a wall and often under a window, so the window board is drawn with the top rather than added later from a second offcut. A bathroom over a kitchen has its waste run already decided. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A boxed soil stack takes depth from where the basin wants it.

Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. An en-suite off a bedroom adds a second flight, not a second job. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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. A cloakroom top is a single armful off the tail lift.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop design & quotation and worktop installation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Repeat bathrooms come cheaper per top, not per square metre. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. A converted house needs a vanity on every floor.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. 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 offcut decides the colour more often than the brochure does. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. 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. Wall-hung means the wall carries the basin, so the wall gets checked. Send the unit layout for every bathroom at once with the basin and tap models against each, so the slab can be nested for all of them. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. 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.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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 bath is usually in the way before the doorway is.

A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. 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. Protection goes down the stairs as well as along the hall.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. The van moves on. The fitter stays with the vanity.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A veined vanity is nested for what shows above the basin.