Splashbacks and upstands in Tooting Graveney

Yes. Tooting Graveney is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW17. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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 under-stair cupboard opens off the kitchen in most of them, and its door swing is the reason a corner run stops where it does. That leaves a ragged band right where the upstand has to sit, which is fine for a 100mm upstand that covers it, but a full-height splashback needs the wall made good first or it will rock on the high spots. A hundred millimetres covers more than it looks. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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 panel takes its height off the steel.

Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. 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. Two people to a panel, however light it looks on the van. 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. Upstands travel in a crate and can wait on the van, which gives some flexibility a full-height panel does not. The crate stays on the van until the route in is clear.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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. One damaged panel, one twin already on the shelf. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because a cut-out in the wrong place means a new piece. Sockets move on site far more often than plans do.

The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. 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. Long walls break where the worktop breaks. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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. Upstands sit tight because both edges are cut. The old tiling must be off and the wall made good and dry before templating, not on fitting day. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. A second visit needs a second permission.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. It decides whether the run gets one continuous piece or a set of separate lengths with a joint at every obstruction. A breast return is scribed on three edges.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Upstands follow the return round the corner.

Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. 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. The ceiling over a staircase limits a standing panel as much as the walls.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. The chimney breast served a back boiler and is usually still standing, so there is a shallow recess on one side of the room. The ragged band left when old tiles and laminate come off together is what usually decides upstand over full height. The plaster behind it is the real question.