Splashbacks and upstands in Gascoigne

Yes. Gascoigne is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are IG11. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. 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. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Concrete panel walls bow noticeably over the length of a run, so the template picks up the real line and the back edge is cut to follow it. Dense concrete takes adhesive better than fixings, which actually suits a large bonded panel. Old walls lean back, and a tall panel shows it. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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. Full height wants a flat wall behind it.

Carrying down a flight is not the easier direction, because the weight runs ahead of the crew and whoever is at the bottom has no way of stopping a slip. 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. The frame they travel in needs the clearance as well. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. Upstands travel in a crate and can wait on the van, which gives some flexibility a full-height panel does not. The crate exists for the walk from the van.

Yes, one of the three we see most, with worktop replacement ahead of it. Same visit to template, same workshop, same installers on the day. Upgrading a builder-finish kitchen is mostly a swap, so the cost sits in the material choice rather than in the shape of the room. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Upstands turn batch offcuts into finished rooms. Handover-spec kitchens are square, plumb and predictable, which means the join count is honest and driven by run length rather than by the building. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because a cut-out in the wrong place means a new piece. The cheap way to make eight kitchens look specified.

Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. 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. Vein direction carries up from the top below. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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. Each obstruction is another joint, and it is priced as 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. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Two budgets, settled before anything is cut.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. It decides whether the run gets one continuous piece or a set of separate lengths with a joint at every obstruction. The panel takes its height off the steel.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Corner sinks and corner hobs sit exactly where the joint wants to be, so on an L the cut-out positions get settled before the join positions do. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Behind an island there is no wall to hide against.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. One leg of an L is nearly always the working run and the other little more than a landing space, but both are templated, cut and edged to the same standard. Upstands follow the run exactly, so every internal and external corner is a separate mitred or butted piece. Socket cut-outs are machined, not chipped in on site.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Kitchens are compact and standardised, which makes the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines a larger share of the total than the stone. The rough band left where tiles took the plaster with them is covered by the upstand rather than made good twice. Sockets in a stud wall move more easily than sockets in brick.