Splashbacks and upstands in Highgate

Yes. Highgate is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N6, N19. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. Long panels and long carries do not mix. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Ceiling beams cross the room at a height that decides where a piece can be stood on edge and where it cannot. 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 wall makes that decision, not the brochure. 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. Full height wants a flat wall behind it.

Once a long piece is in on the diagonal there is no room left for anyone else, so it travels up alone and is met on the landing above. 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. Panel size is checked against the tightest point rather than the average one. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. Upstands travel in a crate and can wait on the van, which gives some flexibility a full-height panel does not. Off the van last, and never in a hurry.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is 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. 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. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Wipe-down beats sealed grout on a turnaround. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because a cut-out in the wrong place means a new piece. Plot spec panels are ordered by the plot, not the room.

Three stools along one side need more clear length than most plans allow, and once the seating depth is fixed the piece either grows or it loses a seat. 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. Upstands follow the return round the corner. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

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. Each obstruction is another joint, and it is priced as one. 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. Full-height panels need the wall made good first, which is another trade and another timescale. One visit for upstands, two for full-height panels.

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. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. These kitchens carry two ovens, a wine cabinet and a boiling tap, so the cut-out count runs well ahead of what the length of the runs suggests. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. Old walls take a scribed upstand better than a rigid panel.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. Full-height panels are the awkward thing to move, light enough to lift and long enough to flex on the way. The crate exists for the walk from the van.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. Pieces get staged in the ground floor lobby and sent up singly, which needs somewhere to stand them where nobody will walk into them. 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. They come in last so nothing is carried past them.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. The hob panel is sized after the extractor, not before.