Splashbacks and upstands in Upton Park

Yes. Upton Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E13, E6. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Newham. On an event day the controls are wider, tighter and enforced harder than the signage suggests on any other morning of the week. Upstands travel in a crate and can wait on the van, which gives some flexibility a full-height panel does not. Handling is where these pieces get damaged. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

An infill house is built to modern standards on an old plot, so the room is square even though the site around it is not. 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. Cut from the same slab run as the tops. Heavy cooking use here means people want deep upstands and a solid splashback behind the range, not a 6mm glass panel.

The market street and the surrounding shopping parades are congested through the day with loading restrictions, so residential drops are best mid-morning off the side streets. The redeveloped stadium site apartments have their own service entrance and lift booking system, quite unlike the terraces around them. The lift has to be booked and blanketed before anything moves, and that booking needs to cover the old tops coming out as well as the new stone going in. Where the route is tight we break a long splashback at a natural vertical joint instead of forcing one panel through. That is agreed at template, not on fitting day.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop installation. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. Extended households run kitchens hard, and that pushes the specification towards granite or sintered stone rather than a light quartz. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Sockets final before template. Households sharing a house tend to want two prep areas rather than one, which usually means an island as well as a perimeter run. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because a cut-out in the wrong place means a new piece. Siliconed to the worktop, never grouted.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Joint placement is a decision, not an accident. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. 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. Make the wall good first, or accept the detail. 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. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. Full-height panels need the wall made good first, which is another trade and another timescale. Same slab run as the tops.