Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Marks Gate

Yes. Marks Gate is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM6. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. Where the drive is shared, the half-hour the van spends in the way is agreed with the neighbour in advance rather than apologised for at the 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. We arrive with the offcut pieces already labelled by room. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The first kitchen units were metal and screwed straight into the blockwork, and their plugs are still in the wall behind whatever plaster went over them. 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 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The unit is packed level before the top goes near it.

Concierge buildings want the goods entrance, a booked lift and proof of insurance, all of which is straightforward when it is asked for a week out. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Nobody carries a drilled vanity top by one end. A step up from the drive to the threshold turns the last two metres into a lift, and a lift is where two pairs of hands become the minimum. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. An en-suite and a family bathroom come off the same load.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. 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. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme. 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. 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 building turned over floor by floor needs the batch held.

A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past 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. A narrow top nests into waste nobody else wants. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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 boxed soil stack takes depth from where the basin wants it. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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. Approval comes before the aperture is drawn, not after.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. A passive vent or a ducted extract shaft takes a corner of the kitchen from floor to ceiling and cannot be reduced. 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 depth sets the piece, not the length of the wall.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. The chimney breast in the kitchen served a back boiler behind the living room fire, so the flue is a shared one and the breast is deeper than a fireplace would need. 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.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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. Wall-hung means the wall carries the basin, so the wall gets checked.

Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Windows sit in deep concrete reveals with a cast sill, and that reveal is usually the least square thing in the room. A vanity top is where all of that turns up in miniature, with the basin, the tap holes and a splash return crowded into a few hundred millimetres of stone. The same stone as the kitchen, in a narrower cut.