Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Shadwell

Yes. Shadwell is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E1. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. Where a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. 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. The shelves come in with the top so nobody returns for them. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Ceiling heights are held to the minimum the plan allows, so the panel between worktop and wall units is a short piece. Bathrooms in these are square, plumb and finished before anyone moves in, so the template is short work and the whole question becomes what the unit is fixed to. Old pipework is boxed rather than moved, and the top notches round it. Dot-and-dab plasterboard sounds solid and is hollow behind, so anything fixed through it has to hit a dab or a batten rather than a void. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A stud wall takes a vanity only once there is timber behind it.

Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. 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. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. A vanity delivery is minutes at the kerb, not hours.

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 design & quotation. 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. A second kitchen or a kitchenette in an annexe is a small job with the same fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines as a large one. 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. Shared houses want quartz vanities and no sealing regime. Where an annexe has been built or converted, its floor and its walls are newer than the main house and behave differently under the same run. 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. Where every bathroom matches, one slab covers the building.

A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. 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.

Taped internal angles in plasterboard belly at the corner, so the run picks up a few millimetres over the last 300mm and a plan-angle mitre will not close. 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. Nothing in a bathroom is square, and the top has to be. Confirm the unit depth for each bathroom separately, book the lift if the building wants it booked, and have both taps on site. Managed stock usually comes with its own rules about working hours, waste, and who is allowed on site. 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. Honed stone in a bathroom asks more of whoever cleans it.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. Where the kitchen swallows the whole slab there is no offcut worth having, and the vanity then has to be priced against material bought for itself. Two rooms, one batch, one delivery.

Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Extended households run kitchens hard, and that pushes the specification towards granite or sintered stone rather than a light quartz. 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 landlord specifying once is specifying tap holes once.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Where a partition has been built off the floor screed rather than off the slab, it moves, and a mitre bonded across that corner is the first thing to open. 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 low window over the basin caps the splash return.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Every flat on the floor is the same plan handed left and right, so the room is predictable even where the building is not. Partition walls are plasterboard on studs, and a wall-hung vanity carrying stone wants timber behind the board rather than fixings into plasterboard alone. Square rooms make short work of a vanity template.