Splashbacks and upstands in Tokyngton and Brent Park

Yes. Tokyngton and Brent Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA9, NW10. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Brent. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. Wind on an open street matters more than the walk does. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

These are built in dense concrete, so support for a peninsula or an end panel goes in with proper anchors rather than plugs. The rear kitchen wall in ex-council flats and maisonettes is commonly dense in-situ concrete or blockwork with a thin skim, which means mechanical fixings are hard work and the splashback is held on adhesive rather than screwed. A chimney breast breaks the run and the panels follow it. 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 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.

A height barrier on the car park entrance rules out a tail-lift van outright, and the stone then transfers to a trolley at the barrier itself. 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. Upstands make almost any turn a worktop will not. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. Standing a panel on the pavement is the last resort.

It sits second or third on this patch, behind worktop replacement. Same template visit, same benches, same installers either way. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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. 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. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. The extension electrician finishes after the drawing did.

The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. 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. 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 boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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. Access is arranged through a managing agent or a scheme office rather than with the household directly, so a date gets confirmed once in writing and moving it costs a fortnight. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. An owner can wait for it; a void period cannot.

Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. 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.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Height is agreed before the cut list closes.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Where the kitchen is on the entrance level, the piece comes off the deck and turns straight in without going up or down at all. Dense concrete takes adhesive better than fixings, which actually suits a large bonded panel. Where the plaster undulates, the shorter piece wins.

Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. A service duct runs between the kitchen and the bathroom stacked above it, and access to that duct stays open whatever the layout does. The rough band left where tiles took the plaster with them is covered by the upstand rather than made good twice. The tile bed comes off before anything is measured.