Splashbacks and upstands in Hadley Wood

Yes. Hadley Wood is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EN4. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. 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. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Floors are boards over joists with a solid floor only in the service rooms, and the two meet somewhere in the middle of the kitchen. Behind a range cooker with gas burners, granite or sintered stone is the sensible pick; quartz has a resin binder and does not enjoy sustained radiant heat at close range, so keep it out of the immediate hob zone or specify a different material for that panel. The tile bed comes off before anything is measured. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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.

Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. 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. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. 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 really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. The extension electrician finishes after the drawing did. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because a cut-out in the wrong place means a new piece. Upstands turn batch offcuts into finished rooms.

Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Every internal corner is two pieces, not one. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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 range and extractor must be sited and the window cill finished before the template, as both fix the vertical limits of the splashback. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. Full-height panels need the wall made good first, which is another trade and another timescale. Same slab run, so it is settled at drawing stage.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. 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. The old scullery is a step down from the main room and the pantry beyond it is a step down again. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. Sockets move on paper more easily than in stone.

What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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. A window board below worktop height ends the upstand argument.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. 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 up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Arts and Crafts houses have deep eaves, low windows and inglenook recesses, so the kitchen has more corners and reveals than its floor area suggests. Long runs mean more than one piece, and the joint belongs in a corner or on a hob centre line rather than mid-run. Panels expose a wall; upstands forgive one.