Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Fullwell Cross

Yes. Fullwell Cross is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are IG6. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Redbridge. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. The plumber and the van rarely want the street on the same day. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The internal stair is usually a straight flight with a tight top landing, and it is the landing rather than the flight that is the limit. Bathrooms in this stock are compact, squarely built and take a short vanity that will come out of almost any offcut, which makes them among the cheapest bathroom tops we cut. What the wall is made of decides how the unit is fixed. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A cloakroom under a stair slope limits the tap before the top.

A short run of external steps before the communal door means a piece is lifted twice before the staircase proper has even started. 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 bath is usually in the way before the doorway is. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Two pieces and a tube of sealant is the whole delivery.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. 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. Cloakrooms are the piece most often forgotten at ordering. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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.

Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. What the kitchen cannot use, the vanity usually can. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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. What is behind the plaster decides how a vanity is fixed. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. 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 fixed changeover date leaves no room to redrill a top.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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 top follows the unit, and the unit follows a level.

Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. These are built in dense concrete, so support for a peninsula or an end panel goes in with proper anchors rather than plugs. The complication is the service riser boxed into a corner: the top is notched round it with a radiused internal corner, never a square one, and the notch is machined at the works from a measurement taken at the finished face. The bathroom in a house like this is rarely where it started.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. 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. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. 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. One template visit covers both rooms if both are ready.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. A narrow top nests into waste a kitchen cut list would otherwise throw away, which makes it the cheapest stone in the job. The vanity comes off what the kitchen leaves behind.