Splashbacks and upstands in Becontree Heath

Yes. Becontree Heath is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM8, RM10. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. 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. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. Nothing this long gets walked while a warden is circling. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Whole streets went up to two or three plans, so the house next door has the same kitchen and forty years of extensions have made none of them measure the same. The rear kitchen wall in ex-council flats and maisonettes is commonly dense in-situ concrete or blockwork with a thin skim, which means mechanical fixings are hard work and the splashback is held on adhesive rather than screwed. Blown plaster comes off before stone goes on. 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. A tall panel that fits at the worktop will stand off the wall at the top unless the wall is dubbed out or the panel is scribed. A breast return is scribed on three edges.

Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. Splashback panels are lighter than a worktop and far more awkward, because a tall thin piece has to be carried on edge and cannot be tilted to clear a turn. They come in last so nothing is carried past them. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. The crate stays on the van until the route in is clear.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop replacement. 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. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. Cut as a set, so one can replace another. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. The offcuts finish the room.

It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. The same shape decides where splashback pieces break, and a joint in a corner reads as a detail while one in a clear run reads as a mistake. Tall panels are what push a job into a second slab. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. Where the wall cannot be made good, setting the stone deliberately proud on a subframe with a shadow gap reads as a detail rather than a bad fit. Set it proud on a subframe and the gap becomes deliberate. Any surface trunking or conduit has to be rerouted or accepted and boxed before templating, because the stone cannot be scribed around a live conduit on site. Residents are given written notice before anyone attends, and that notice period rather than the workshop is what governs the earliest sensible start. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. An owner can wait for it; a void period cannot.

The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. It is usually the full-height panels rather than the tops that will not make the turn, and that only shows up when they arrive. Suction lifters take a panel where hands cannot get a grip.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Windows sit in deep concrete reveals with a cast sill, and that reveal is usually the least square thing in the room. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. Old walls take a scribed upstand better than a rigid panel.

An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. It decides whether the run gets one continuous piece or a set of separate lengths with a joint at every obstruction. An upstand rides what a panel exposes.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Height is agreed before the cut list closes.