Splashbacks and upstands in Park Langley

Yes. Park Langley is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR3. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. The longer the walk, the fewer the panels per trip. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

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. 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. Nothing goes on a wall that will not hold it. A deep scribe comes out of the nest, so how far the stone has to be relieved changes which part of the slab the piece is cut from. 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. A downstand sets the panel height, not the wall units.

There is no leaning a piece against a wall halfway up, so any flight longer than a dozen treads is planned around a rest point on a 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. Panel size is checked against the tightest point rather than the average one. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. Upstands travel in a crate and can wait on the van, which gives some flexibility a full-height panel does not. A narrow gap between parked cars decides how a panel turns.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and 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. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. Less to clean, for whoever cleans it. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Panels for every unit, cut in one go.

A downdraught extractor takes a long slot out of the middle of the piece and a motor housing out of the cabinet below it, so what sits under the top is settled before anything is cut. 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. A galley shows both walls at the same time. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

A downstand over a run caps wall unit height before it caps anything else, and the splashback then takes its height from the steel rather than from the units. 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. Behind the boxing it becomes two pieces. 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. A deferred splashback still comes off this drawing.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. Pendant fittings over the stairwell and anything hung on the half-landing come down first, because a piece on edge sweeps a wider arc than the people carrying it. Where the route is tight we break a long splashback at a natural vertical joint instead of forcing one panel through. They come in last so nothing is carried past them.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. These are the multi-piece jobs, where vein direction across a join matters as much as the join itself. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. Height is taken at the shortest point of the run.

Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Encased steel is always bigger than the steel inside it, so the casing is what gets plotted, and a casing is rarely square to the wall it sits against. It decides whether the run gets one continuous piece or a set of separate lengths with a joint at every obstruction. Nothing gets hidden behind a full-height panel.

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. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Return ends are polished, not left sawn.