Splashbacks and upstands in Eel Pie Island

Yes. Eel Pie Island is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW1. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. Off the van last, and never in a hurry. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Many were built with a solid sub-floor to the rear rooms, so the kitchen floor is concrete and level while the front of the house is suspended timber. Where a client wants a full-height piece behind the hob, it usually sits in the old chimney recess, and that recess is rarely square top to bottom or side to side, so it has to be templated as a trapezium rather than a rectangle. What the plaster is stuck to matters more than its colour. A partition that gives when you lean on it will give under someone sitting at an overhang, and a bonded mitre nearby is where that movement shows first. 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. Mitred returns come from one place in the slab.

Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. 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. Panels are carried on edge from the tail lift to the wall. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. The crate exists for the walk from the van.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and worktop installation. 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. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. A repeated spec needs a repeatable splashback. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. One damaged panel, one twin already on the shelf.

On a book-matched pair the halves are laid out so the mirror line runs down the length of the piece, and once that line is set the top cannot be turned round to suit anything else. 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. External corners are mitred, not butted. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Where a peninsula returns into a stud wall the load has to sit on the units, with the wall doing no more than steadying it. 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. The pier takes a joint against it, not across it. The chimney breast recess must be replastered and fully dry, and the hob and extractor positions fixed, before anyone templates a full-height piece into it. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Upstand height taken from the specification.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. 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. The frame they travel in needs the clearance as well.

Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. A hall radiator or a coat hook at shoulder height takes a hundred millimetres off the usable width, and a hundred millimetres is often the entire margin. Where the route is tight we break a long splashback at a natural vertical joint instead of forcing one panel through. A vertical break is easier to live with than a cracked panel.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Ground floors fall away towards the garden across the whole footprint, so the units are packed up long before anything is measured for stone. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. Panel thickness changes what the sockets need behind them.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Panel height is set by the extractor.