Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Limehouse

Yes. Limehouse is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E14. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. A suspension is charged by the bay and by the day, so the number of metres asked for is worth getting right the first time. 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. Tap holes are drilled at the works, so nothing keeps the van waiting. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

A riverside block is a managed building with a booked goods lift, a loading bay and a concierge, and all three have to line up on the same day. Partition walls are plasterboard on studs, and a wall-hung vanity carrying stone wants timber behind the board rather than fixings into plasterboard alone. Square rooms make short work of a vanity template. 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. Nothing in a bathroom is square, and the top has to be.

The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. 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 vanity top is lifted once and set down once. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The basin travels in the van with the top it belongs to.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop replacement. 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. 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. 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. Several small tops nest better than one large one. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme.

A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. One slab run, so the bathroom matches the kitchen. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

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 low window over the basin caps the splash return. Confirm the unit depth for each bathroom separately, book the lift if the building wants it booked, and have both taps on site. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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. The stone outlasts the unit under it, whoever owns the flat.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. No money changes hands before the template. The lift car, the loading bay and the building manager decide the piece sizes here, not the slab. 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 bridge of stone behind the basin is the part that matters.

Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. 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. Loft en-suites arrive up the tightest flight in the house.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. The units stay where they are and only the surface changes. A permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole morning. 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. A second visit for a splash return is one we would rather avoid.

Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. It usually means the bathroom is decided late, after the kitchen, and by then the offcut that would have suited it has gone. A building turned over floor by floor needs the batch held.