Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in St Katharine Docks

Yes. St Katharine Docks is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E1W. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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 whole bathroom fits on a trolley in one load. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Flats are handed in pairs about the stair core, so half the kitchens in the block are the mirror image of the other half. Bathrooms in this stock are compact, squarely built and take a short vanity that will come out of almost any offcut, which makes them among the cheapest bathroom tops we cut. Concrete walls take a bracket well and a chase badly. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A sloping floor is corrected under the unit, not under the stone.

Bollards, planters and a one-way service road can turn what looks like a ten-metre carry into a fifty-metre one. 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. A double vanity is a worktop as far as the carry is concerned. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. 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.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. 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. En-suites and family bathrooms rarely take the same depth. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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. Repeat work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought.

A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through 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. The thickness follows the kitchen unless you ask otherwise. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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 tap has to clear the reveal before the hole is drilled. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. 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. Owner bathrooms get the slab viewed; let ones get the sample.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The carry is the constraint: a single stair with tight half-landings, or deck access with a long walk from the lift. 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. Shelves and a window board come off the same offcut.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Windows sit high and the sill line crosses the middle of the run, which limits what can go above the worktop. 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 stone is the simple half of a bathroom fit.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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.

The workmanship guarantee is the same either way. It does not extend to a material we did not supply. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. It usually means the bathroom is decided late, after the kitchen, and by then the offcut that would have suited it has gone. Several small tops nest better than one large one.