Splashbacks and upstands in Corbets Tey

Yes. Corbets Tey is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM14. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. 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. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. A short bay slot is when the tall pieces get damaged. 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. Sockets in a stud wall move more easily than sockets in brick. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. 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. The sill caps the upstand before anything else does.

A loading bay or a red route puts a clock on the unload, so the pieces come off in the order they will be fitted rather than the order they were loaded. 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. A door frame catches a tall panel long before a short one. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. Upstands travel in a crate and can wait on the van, which gives some flexibility a full-height panel does not. Kerb to kitchen is measured before the panels are unstrapped.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. 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. Grout lines are the first thing to fail in a let. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because a cut-out in the wrong place means a new piece. Six kitchens, one socket layout, one panel drawing.

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. 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. The run decides where that joint falls. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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 downstand sets the panel height, not the wall units. 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 someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. The wall trade answers to a different budget.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. 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. Window reveals decide where the run of stone stops.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. 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. Splashbacks come off the same slab run as the tops, which means the decision has to be made before fabrication starts. The extractor position is measured before the panel is drawn.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. The van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. 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. Joint positions follow from that.

Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. Where the route is tight we break a long splashback at a natural vertical joint instead of forcing one panel through. It decides panel size before anything is cut.