Splashbacks and upstands in Holloway

Yes. Holloway is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N7. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. Where a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. They go in with the first load where the stop is short. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Where the kitchen has taken the bay, the end of the room is three facets of glass set at angles and there is no straight wall left to finish against. Lath-and-plaster on the party wall and the chimney breast returns almost never runs true, so a 100mm upstand bedded on silicone is the honest answer here, it rides the bow and hides the junction the worktop can never close on its own. Dry lining behind a panel needs a fixing plan of its own. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. Scribe the top edge too or it stands off.

Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. 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. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. Rushing the last piece off the van is how panels break.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop replacement. Whichever it is, the template and the fitters do not change. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. One conversion drawing repeats its mistakes six times. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Cut now, stored for the next void.

Bi-fold or sliding doors at the end of the return mean the run finishes against a frame rather than a wall, and a frame gives nothing to scribe into and no movement to take up. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. The seam sits in shadow or it sits in a corner. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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 sill caps the upstand before anything else does. 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. The wall trade answers to a different budget.

The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Lower ground floor kitchens are reached by a stair with a winder in it, and the head height over that winder is lower than the room at either end. Splashbacks come off the same slab run as the tops, which means the decision has to be made before fabrication starts. Boxed pipework decides the panel width before taste does.

Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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 downstand sets the panel height, not the wall units.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. A car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a three-metre worktop however it is stood, and there is no trimming it on the landing. 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.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. A cast iron soil stack runs down the outside of the rear wall, so moving the sink means a fresh penetration through solid brick. Socket positions, sill heights and wall flatness are the three things that settle this, and all three are properties of the building. Making the wall good first is cheaper than working around it.