Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Plashet

Yes. Plashet is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E6, E7. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Newham. Where the household has used up the visitor permits it gets for the year, the remaining options are a suspension or a paid bay and both belong on the quote. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A bay for twenty minutes is enough for a vanity. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Ceilings in the principal rooms are three metres or more, so a full-height panel behind a hob is a taller piece here than the same kitchen would need anywhere else. 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. Deep reveals turn a window board into a real piece of stone. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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 unit is packed level before the top goes near it.

A carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. 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. Estate roads inside a controlled zone are sometimes managed privately rather than by the council, which changes who has to be asked. 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. We arrive with the offcut pieces already labelled by room.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. 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. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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. Batched vanity tops are templated in one visit. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. Two basins in one room is one piece, not two.

Handles on opposing runs meet in the middle of the aisle, so a deep edge profile specified on both sides takes width out of the standing space twice over. 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. Two rooms, one batch, one delivery. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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 boxed soil stack takes depth from where the basin wants it. 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. Whoever signs it off is whoever chooses the basin.

Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. Wall-hung means the wall carries the basin, so the wall gets checked.

Say what you have and where it came from before anything is booked, because thickness and batch decide what can be done with it. Order is what matters: a slab is templated before it is cut, so an uncut slab is straightforward and one already machined for another kitchen is not. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. It usually means the bathroom is decided late, after the kitchen, and by then the offcut that would have suited it has gone. Loft rooms bring an en-suite and a very tight flight.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. The hall is the only way in and out for whoever lives there, so it is cleared and then kept clear for as long as pieces are moving. 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. Nothing is stood on edge once the tap holes are drilled.

The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. A villa cut into flats leaves kitchens in rooms that were never kitchens, with services run to wherever they could physically be made to reach. Where a bedroom has been divided to make a bathroom the window sits off centre to the new room and the vanity ends up under it, which puts the window board in the order rather than outside it. Concrete walls take a bracket well and a chase badly.