Splashbacks and upstands in Kingston Hill

Yes. Kingston Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are KT2. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Kingston upon Thames. 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. The crate exists for the walk from the van. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These houses usually sit in their own grounds with a long approach, so the carry from van to door is longer than anything inside the building. These runs are long and often include a range recess, so the splashback is nearly always more than one piece and the joint placement matters, put it in a corner or over a hob centre line, not randomly in the middle of a clear run. Sockets in a stud wall move more easily than sockets in brick. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. 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. The panel takes its height off the steel.

Where the turn inside is tight the piece gets turned on the path and brought in already on edge, which needs room in front of the door as well as behind it. 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. Upstands make almost any turn a worktop will not. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. Upstands travel in a crate and can wait on the van, which gives some flexibility a full-height panel does not. A tall panel and a timed bay is the worst combination here.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is 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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. Cut now, stored for the next void. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Same batch, or the join will say so.

An island carries its own edge detail all the way round, so a mitred 100mm apron on four sides is four mitres cut, bonded and polished before the piece ever leaves the bench. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. A joint behind a tap is a joint on show. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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. Upstands sit tight because both edges are cut. The range and extractor must be sited and the window cill finished before the template, as both fix the vertical limits of the splashback. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Plastering finishes on somebody else’s timescale.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. A steel goes in where the original back wall came out, and the ceiling steps down under it at the point the run passes beneath. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. Twenty millimetres of packing behind a panel is not a fix.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Sliding or folding doors take the whole garden wall, so a long stretch of the room has glass where a wall would otherwise carry the units. Splashbacks come off the same slab run as the tops, which means the decision has to be made before fabrication starts. The batch is held while the tops are cut, or the colour drifts.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. Full-height panels are the awkward thing to move, light enough to lift and long enough to flex on the way. They go in with the first load where the stop is short.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Everything comes through the front door and down the hall, so the tightest point on the route is usually the newel post at the foot of the stairs. Where the route is tight we break a long splashback at a natural vertical joint instead of forcing one panel through. Two people to a panel, however light it looks on the van.