Splashbacks and upstands in Canary Wharf

Yes. Canary Wharf is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E14. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. Standing a panel on the pavement is the last resort. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A refuse chute or a service duct takes a corner of the kitchen in several of the standard plans, and neither of them moves. 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. A hundred millimetres covers more than it looks. 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 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. Make the wall good first, or accept the detail.

A lift out of service for the day turns a straightforward install into a stair carry, so the slot gets confirmed with whoever manages the building rather than against a calendar. 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. Full height goes in only where the way in allows full height. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. Handling is where these pieces get damaged.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop fabrication. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. 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. Reordered next year, it will not match. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because a cut-out in the wrong place means a new piece. Full height behind the hob is less for a tenant to scrub.

Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. 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. Joint placement is a decision, not an accident. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. Scribed, dubbed out, or set proud. Pick one. 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. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Two trades, two budgets, one drawing.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Car depth is the number that settles it wherever a piece cannot be stood upright, and most residential cars are shallower than the run they are serving. Where the route is tight we break a long splashback at a natural vertical joint instead of forcing one panel through. Upstands make almost any turn a worktop will not.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. Upstands follow the run exactly, so every internal and external corner is a separate mitred or butted piece. Corners get their own pieces.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Kitchens in this stock are compact and reasonably square, which makes the fixed lines a larger share of the total than the material is. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. The batch is held while the tops are cut, or the colour drifts.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. It decides whether the run gets one continuous piece or a set of separate lengths with a joint at every obstruction. The obstruction sets the joint, not the wall.