Splashbacks and upstands in St Luke's

Yes. St Luke's is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC1V. 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. Nothing this long gets walked while a warden is circling. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The original fitted dresser and the vent to outside air have often left their openings behind the units, unfilled and unrecorded. Each return needs its own piece with a mitred or butted external corner, and those pieces should come off the same slab so the movement lines up across the corner. Panels expose a wall; upstands forgive one. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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.

Weight tells on a staircase more than anywhere else, because there is nowhere to set a piece down mid-flight and no way to change your grip once it is moving. 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. The break goes where a joint reads as deliberate. 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. The crate stays on the van until the route in is clear.

Often enough. It is one of the three, behind worktop replacement. The template, the workshop and the installers are the same either way. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. Six kitchens, one socket layout, one panel drawing. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. The annexe gets the same panel as the main run.

A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. 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 peninsula end takes a panel on both faces. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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 riser boxing must be finished in its final form and any access panel positions agreed before the template, since the stone is set out around them. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Whoever specifies it signs the drawing.

The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. It decides whether the run gets one continuous piece or a set of separate lengths with a joint at every obstruction. A downstand sets the panel height, not the wall units.

Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. The carcasses stay put. Only the surface changes. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. Upstands travel in a crate and can wait on the van, which gives some flexibility a full-height panel does not. Distance from tail lift to door is the whole risk here.

Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Floors are concrete with a screed and a thin finish, so there is no give anywhere and packing the carcasses is the only way to get a plane. Boxed risers break the run into returns, and every return is a separate piece with its own mitred corner. What the wall can take decides how tall the stone goes.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Scribe to the wall rather than stretch the panel.