Splashbacks and upstands in Sudbury Hill

Yes. Sudbury Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA1, HA2. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Harrow. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. A panel carried past a live lane gets a second pair of hands. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The plan runs front to back with a spine wall between, so the kitchen is two rooms of work rather than one open space. Long runs mean more than one piece, and the joint belongs in a corner or on a hob centre line rather than mid-run. What the plaster is stuck to matters more than its colour. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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 hall radiator or a coat hook at shoulder height takes a hundred millimetres off the usable width, and a hundred millimetres is often the entire margin. It is usually the full-height panels rather than the tops that will not make the turn, and that only shows up when they arrive. What can be got into the room decides the height above the worktop. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. Nothing this long gets walked while a warden is circling.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. The annexe gets the same panel as the main run. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. A repeated spec needs a repeatable splashback.

A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. 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. Every internal corner is two pieces, not one. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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 range and extractor must be sited and the window cill finished before the template, as both fix the vertical limits of the splashback. A quartz sample left on the counter for a week under the actual kitchen lights settles more arguments than any showroom, and an owner is the only person in a position to do that. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Upstand height taken from the specification.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. A downstand sets the panel height, not the wall units.

Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. A townhouse is tall and narrow with the kitchen at the bottom, so every piece goes down a staircase rather than along a hall. Granite or sintered stone goes behind a range rather than quartz, because a resin binder does not enjoy sustained radiant heat. A reveal in a thick wall changes where the panel stops.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. Upstands follow the run exactly, so every internal and external corner is a separate mitred or butted piece. Long walls break where the worktop breaks.

The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. Where the hall runs straight through to the back the piece can be walked in flat, and it is only the two door frames that have to be cleared. Where the route is tight we break a long splashback at a natural vertical joint instead of forcing one panel through. They stand upright in the van and stay upright until they are on the wall.