Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Old Ford

Yes. Old Ford is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E3. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. 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. Ordered with the kitchen, the bathroom costs no extra journey. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The party wall is the straightest surface in the house and everything else has moved away from it over a century. Either way the walls are thin, the floor is boards over shallow joists and nothing meets at a right angle, so the vanity is scribed at both ends and the unit is fixed back to the wall as well as standing on the floor. A pod bathroom inside a shell has walls built last week. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one.

Where the staircase comes down into the hall the bottom treads project into the width, and nothing about that can be moved for the day. 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. Long thin shelves break on the turn, not on the road. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. A bathroom booked on its own rarely fills a day, so it can be put into whichever part of the day the street is easiest. A bathroom return visit is planned around the street, not the diary.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Small tops are where a slab finally gets fully used. 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. 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 vanity is the piece that makes a converted flat read finished.

Everything on an island is fed from underneath, extraction, a socket run, a hob and sometimes a waste, and each of them wants its hole before the top is bonded down. 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. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. 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 bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats. 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. A vanity is small enough to be the one indulgence in a bathroom.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Injected damp courses and re-rendered lower walls leave the bottom metre standing proud of everything above it. 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. It is the smallest piece we cut and the most crowded.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. A tiled hall floor takes a dropped corner badly, so boards go down over the tiles before anything comes through the door. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. The window board is the piece that catches a door frame.

The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. 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 wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Island units are rarely fixed to anything at first fix, so they get screwed to the floor and levelled against the perimeter run before the stone is measured at all. 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.