Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Whalebone

Yes. Whalebone is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM8. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Copper pipework is clipped along the top of the skirting rather than buried in many of these, and it holds the carcasses off the wall by a few millimetres. The complication is the service riser boxed into a corner: the top is notched round it with a radiused internal corner, never a square one, and the notch is machined at the works from a measurement taken at the finished face. Stud partitions want noggins before a wall-hung unit goes up. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The scribe on a vanity is measured in depth it cannot spare.

Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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 window board is the piece that catches a door frame. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. 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. A bathroom slot is booked short and kept short.

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. 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. The bathroom schedule follows the plumber, not the programme. 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. A building turned over floor by floor needs the batch held.

The joint where a peninsula meets the main run wants a gable directly under it, and where the units do not offer one, steel goes in to carry that joint instead. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. Offcut stock is the cheapest stone a vanity will ever sit on. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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 sloping floor is corrected under the unit, not under the stone. Have the boxing in its final finished form before the template, along with the fixed unit, the basin and the tap. Where a landlord or housing provider is involved there is a specification to meet and a process to follow, and both are settled before a date is offered. 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. Keys, dates and the basin should sit with the same person.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. 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. 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. Nothing is stood on edge once the tap holes are drilled.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. 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. Everything the bathroom needs comes off the van at once.

Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Some of these plans put a bathroom on the ground floor off the kitchen, so a third door opens into a room that already has more doors than wall. Bathrooms in these flats are compact and squarely built, and take a short vanity that comes out of almost any offcut. A bathroom over a kitchen has its waste run already decided.

Say what you have and where it came from before anything is booked, because thickness and batch decide what can be done with it. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. 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. One drawing per bathroom, however alike they look.