Splashbacks and upstands in St Paul's

Yes. St Paul's is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC4M. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. 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. 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. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Piece size is set by the lift car and the entrance dogleg, which routinely turns a two-piece kitchen into a three-piece one. The plasterboard is genuinely flat here, so a full-height splashback sits well and a slim upstand looks almost redundant, but the sockets are the problem, because they are set out to the developer's original kitchen and often land at odd heights or right on a joint line. Panels expose a wall; upstands forgive one. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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. Scribe the top edge too or it stands off.

Booked delivery windows on a managed estate run to an hour, and a worktop install does not happen inside an hour. 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. A vertical break is easier to live with than a cracked panel. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. 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.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop replacement. Whichever it is, the template and the fitters do not change. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. One damaged panel, one twin already on the shelf. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Sockets move on site far more often than plans do.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. 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. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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. Any socket you intend to move must be moved and re-plastered before templating, because a cut-out in the wrong place means a new piece of stone. Access in a tenanted flat depends on the tenant, so the template and fitting dates are agreed with whoever actually holds the keys. Full-height panels need the wall made good first, which is another trade and another timescale. The wall has to be ready.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Riser panels, wall boxes and the boiler cupboard sit in fixed positions the developer will not move for a worktop. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. Making the wall good first is cheaper than working around it.

Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. 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. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. 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.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The room is square, the walls are plumb and the floor is flat, so almost every complication in the job belongs to the building rather than the kitchen. Splashbacks come off the same slab run as the tops, which means the decision has to be made before fabrication starts. Same slab run, same day, same batch.