Splashbacks and upstands in Carshalton

Yes. Carshalton is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SM5. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Sutton. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. One trip is always better than three. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The floor is often flags or brick laid straight on the ground, so it is solid, uneven and not going to be levelled by chasing into it. These runs are long and often include a range recess, so the splashback is nearly always more than one piece and the joint placement matters, put it in a corner or over a hob centre line, not randomly in the middle of a clear run. What the wall can take decides how tall the stone goes. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. It is usually what pushes a job towards a 100mm upstand instead of a full-height panel, because an upstand rides what a panel exposes. Upstands sit tight because both edges are cut.

Everything comes through the front door and down the hall, so the tightest point on the route is usually the newel post at the foot of the stairs. 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. It travels on edge, so the clearance is checked on edge. 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. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. That is why they are crated the way they are.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop replacement. 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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. Reordered next year, it will not match. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Full height behind the hob is less for a tenant to scrub.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. 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. Corners get their own pieces. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. 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. The range and extractor must be sited and the window cill finished before the template, as both fix the vertical limits of the splashback. Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Two attendances need two people to be in.

An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. The run decides where that joint falls.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Ceilings are high enough that the wall units sit low against them, which leaves a tall band of wall above the worktop doing nothing. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. An upstand asks less of old plaster than a panel does.

The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. 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. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Big rooms hide their falls, and the difference from one corner of a five metre floor to the other is measured in tens of millimetres. Socket positions, sill heights and wall flatness are the three things that settle this, and all three are properties of the building. Window reveals decide where the run of stone stops.

Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. A narrow entrance hall with a turn into the back of the house caps the longest piece we can physically get in, whatever the run itself measures. 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. Break positions are chosen for the carry.