Splashbacks and upstands in North Kensington

Yes. North Kensington is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. A controlled parking zone means either a visitor permit sorted in advance or a suspended bay, and a suspension is applied for days ahead rather than 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. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The addition is a brick narrower than the house it hangs off, which leaves a stub of the original rear wall standing square to the run at the doorway end. 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. A chimney breast breaks the run and the panels follow it. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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.

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. 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. What can be got into the room decides the height above the worktop. Permit hours are what matters, not the permit itself, because a bay that frees up at six in the evening is no use for a template at ten. Upstands travel in a crate and can wait on the van, which gives some flexibility a full-height panel does not. Long panels and long carries do not mix.

It sits second or third on this patch, behind worktop replacement. Same template visit, same benches, same installers either way. Shared-house kitchens take heavier use from more people than a family kitchen does, and the surface gets chosen on that basis rather than on looks. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. A spare panel is cheaper now than next year. Where a single building holds several small kitchens, the work arrives as one job rather than four, and it should be cut off the same slab run so the batches genuinely match. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Reordered next year, it will not match.

The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Panel widths answer to the slab before the wall. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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. 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. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. 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.

The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. Carcasses stay. Surface changes. That is the whole of it. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. Full-height panels are the awkward thing to move, light enough to lift and long enough to flex on the way. Off the van last, and never in a hurry.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. The lean-to roof drains into a valley gutter against the addition next door, and a long leak there shows at the head of the kitchen wall rather than on the ceiling. A 100mm upstand bedded on silicone is the honest answer where the plaster bows, because it rides what a tall panel exposes. Where the plaster undulates, the shorter piece wins.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. Upstands follow the run exactly, so every internal and external corner is a separate mitred or butted piece. Vein direction carries up from the top below.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. The bathroom upstairs sits directly over the kitchen, so its waste comes down in a boxed corner from floor to ceiling that no worktop is going to move. A full-height panel in a chimney recess is templated as a trapezium, since that recess is square in neither direction. The tile bed comes off before anything is measured.