Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in South Hackney

Yes. South Hackney is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E9. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. Where a loading concession applies at all, it holds only while something is being carried, which makes it a way to unload rather than a way to park. 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. An en-suite and a family bathroom come off the same load. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The combination boiler hangs on whichever wall happened to be external, and that decision has already used up a stretch of the only wall the run wanted. 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. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Wall-hung means the wall carries the basin, so the wall gets checked.

A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. A splash return travels with the top it belongs to. Loading concessions differ from one zone to the next rather than following a single national rule, so what applied on the last job proves nothing about this one. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. No basin aperture is worth rushing for a parking bay.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. 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. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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. A repeated top is still drilled to the taps actually bought. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. 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 rear addition adds a cloakroom before it adds anything else.

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. 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. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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 tile joint behind is what shows a top that is not level. 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. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. 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 chooses the tap is setting the hole spacing.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Suspended timber floors flex underfoot, and anything that moves beneath a unit shows up later as a lipped join. A vanity top is where all of that turns up in miniature, with the basin, the tap holes and a splash return crowded into a few hundred millimetres of stone. The aperture is polished because you look straight down into it.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. A van waiting on a loading concession has somebody standing with it, because a vehicle left unattended is the one that collects the ticket. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. The bathroom pieces come off last and go in first.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. One leg of an L is nearly always the working run and the other little more than a landing space, but both are templated, cut and edged to the same standard. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A vanity is nested last and cut from what is left.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. 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. Stone reaches a bathroom in one trip or it does not reach it.