Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in London Fields

Yes. London Fields is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E8. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. Where a road is shut for filming or for works the diversion adds distance to the carry even when parking itself was never the problem. 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. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

These were built with a scullery that has since been swallowed by an extension, leaving a change of floor level roughly where the run crosses. The bathroom in one of these is almost never original: it is a later room over the back addition, or a bedroom divided in two. A boxed riser in the corner is the usual obstacle upstairs. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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.

Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. 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. A vanity top is lifted once and set down once. Streets near a ground or a venue have restrictions that come and go with the fixture list rather than with the time of day. 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.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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. 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. Several small tops nest better than one large one. 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. 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. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme.

A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. 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. One slab run, so the bathroom matches the kitchen. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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. Have the vanity unit fixed and levelled, and the basin and tap on site, before the templater arrives, and tell us what is inside any boxing. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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 en-suite in a let flat is specified like the bathroom next door.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. The boxed soil stack in the corner is the usual version of it upstairs, and a top that notches round one loses depth exactly where the basin wanted it. A shelf in a shower niche is scribed on three sides.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. The rear room has a bay or a wide window onto the garden, so the sink length is short and the real working length is on the return. The bathroom in one of these is usually a later addition over the back kitchen, so the walls are thinner, the floor moves and a vanity has to sit level in a room that is not. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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. A vanity has no depth to give away to a scribe.

A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Ground floors fall away towards the garden across the whole footprint, so the units are packed up long before anything is measured for stone. 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 stone is the simple half of a bathroom fit.