Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Elm Park

Yes. Elm Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM12. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. 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. Ordered with the kitchen, the bathroom costs no extra journey. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen was laid out around a copper and a larder, so it has more small openings and less continuous wall than its floor area suggests. The original bathroom in these houses is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against a wall at each end, so both ends are scribed and there is no tolerance left between them. Old pipework is boxed rather than moved, and the top notches round it. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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.

Garden routes carry their own hazards: a drain cover, a step up to a patio, wet decking, or a lawn that will not take a loaded trolley. 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. Nothing is stood on edge once the tap holes are drilled. 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. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A bathroom return visit is planned around the street, not the diary.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. 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. The bathroom is decided late and the offcut has usually gone. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Batched vanity tops are templated in one visit.

Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. 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 pieces are labelled on the nest before the saw runs. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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. Settle the tiling height and the basin model first, and let us know whether the unit is standing on the floor or hanging off the wall. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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. A specification repeated across flats is drawn once.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. A side passage and a back door mean the stone rarely has to come through the house, which changes the job more than most people expect. 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 same stone as the kitchen, in a narrower cut.

Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Ceiling heights are modest and the window over the sink is wide and low, which leaves a shallow band for tiling or an upstand. Half-tiled walls are the norm, and the tile line is what the splash return has to meet, which is a decision taken before machining rather than discovered afterwards. A large bathroom is where a double vanity becomes possible.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. 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. 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. Tap holes are drilled at the works, so nothing keeps the van waiting.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. A side gate hung to open outward against a fence post is narrower in use than it measures, and lifting the gate off its hinges is usually the quickest win on the route. 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. A double vanity is a worktop as far as the carry is concerned.