Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Spitalfields

Yes. Spitalfields 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. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. 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. A vanity delivery is minutes at the kerb, not hours. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

A basement is often reached by its own door under the front steps, and that door is smaller than anything else on the route. 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. A boxed riser in the corner is the usual obstacle upstairs. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The tile joint behind is what shows a top that is not level.

A window lift means the glass unit and often the frame come out first, and putting it back weathertight is part of the same 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. The staircase is the last stage of every bathroom carry. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. One trip in with the top, the shelves and the adhesive.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop design & quotation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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 rear addition adds a cloakroom before it adds anything else. 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. 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. Shared houses want quartz vanities and no sealing regime.

Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. 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. The thickness follows the kitchen unless you ask otherwise. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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 stud wall takes a vanity only once there is timber behind 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. A let bathroom wants quartz for the same reason a let kitchen does: nothing to seal, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be briefed on. An agent sees the vanity line and asks about tiling instead.

An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. Nothing in a bathroom is square, and the top has to be.

Nothing is payable in advance of the template. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. Nothing in a house of this age is square, and the kitchen is usually the part that has been altered most often. 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 aperture is polished because you look straight down into it.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. A double vanity is nested like a worktop, not like an offcut.

A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Georgian houses put the kitchen in a basement or a rear closet wing, and the stairs down to it are the tightest part of the whole route. 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. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing.