Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Mawneys

Yes. Mawneys is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM7. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. 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. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

These were built late enough to have a damp course and proper footings, so the front of the house is close to true and the rear addition holding the kitchen is the part that has dropped. 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 bathroom over a kitchen has its waste run already decided. 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. 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.

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. Loft en-suites arrive up the tightest flight in the house. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. 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. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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 run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. 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. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

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. 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. 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. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. 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.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. 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. 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 tile joint behind is what shows a top that is not level.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. It usually means the bathroom is decided late, after the kitchen, and by then the offcut that would have suited it has gone. One drawing per bathroom, however alike they look.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Where a run finishes hard against a wall the last few millimetres are scribed, and where it finishes in open floor it is cut square and polished, which is two different jobs on one length. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The bathroom is drawn while the kitchen is still on the bench.

Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. 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. 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. The piece is carried by its long edges, never by the aperture.