Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Scrattons Farm

Yes. Scrattons Farm is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are IG11. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. 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. Two pieces and a tube of sealant is the whole delivery. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Walls look modern and are not: block or breeze with a skim that has been patched over decades, so dry-laying and scribing still apply. The bathroom is the small room over the kitchen, and the waste already runs where it needs to, so the basin position is more or less settled before anyone draws anything. A bathroom over a kitchen has its waste run already decided. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats.

Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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. Carried flat on a board once the aperture has been cut. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A booked window suits a bathroom better than it suits a kitchen.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. 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. 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. 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. One tap across a building means one drilling setup. 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. 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. Cloakrooms are the piece most often forgotten at ordering.

Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across 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. Offcut stock is the cheapest stone a vanity will ever sit on. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each 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. A wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone. Measure from the finished unit up to the underside of the window sill and send it with the basin and tap models. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. 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. The tap is bought before the top is drilled, whoever buys it.

Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. 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 bathroom booked on its own rarely fills a day, so it can be put into whichever part of the day the street is easiest. The shelves come in with the top so nobody returns for them.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. The window sits in the middle of the run over the sink, and its board and cill set the limit on how tall an upstand can be. Windows sit low over the basin in these houses, and that window caps the height of any splash return before the rest of the room is even considered. High ceilings do nothing for a vanity, but the reveals do.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Units are often only 500mm deep, so a standard 600mm stone top overhangs at the front and the doors need checking against 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. The stone is the simple half of a bathroom fit.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Corner sinks and corner hobs sit exactly where the joint wants to be, so on an L the cut-out positions get settled before the join positions do. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Two rooms, one batch, one delivery.