Splashbacks and upstands in Thames View

Yes. Thames View is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are IG11. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. Wind on an open street matters more than the walk does. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The ground floor is a solid slab with a bitumen membrane and no void under it, so services either run on the surface or get chased into something hard. Dense concrete takes adhesive better than fixings, which actually suits a large bonded panel. Old walls lean back, and a tall panel shows it. 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 is usually what pushes a job towards a 100mm upstand instead of a full-height panel, because an upstand rides what a panel exposes. A downstand sets the panel height, not the wall units.

Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. 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. Upstands make almost any turn a worktop will not. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. Upstands travel in a crate and can wait on the van, which gives some flexibility a full-height panel does not. Standing a panel on the pavement is the last resort.

Often enough. It is one of the three, behind worktop replacement. The template, the workshop and the installers are the same either way. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. Sockets move on site far more often than plans do. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. The extension electrician finishes after the drawing did.

A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Tall panels are what push a job into a second slab. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through 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. Behind the boxing it becomes two pieces. Any surface trunking or conduit has to be rerouted or accepted and boxed before templating, because the stone cannot be scribed around a live conduit on site. 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. The wall has to be ready.

Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Copper pipework is clipped along the top of the skirting rather than buried in many of these, and it holds the carcasses off the wall by a few millimetres. The rough band left where tiles took the plaster with them is covered by the upstand rather than made good twice. Sockets in a stud wall move more easily than sockets in brick.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Some of these plans put a bathroom on the ground floor off the kitchen, so a third door opens into a room that already has more doors than wall. Where the wall carries a service duct the panel stops at the boxing, and that edge is finished as an edge. What the plaster is stuck to matters more than its colour.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. 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. 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. Nothing gets hidden behind a full-height panel.

Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because a cut-out in the wrong place means a new piece. Upstands turn batch offcuts into finished rooms.