Splashbacks and upstands in Victoria Park

Yes. Victoria Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E9. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. The longer the walk, the fewer the panels per trip. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The boiler has usually been moved out of the main house into the addition, and its flue, its pipework and its condensate all cross the wall the run wants. Lath-and-plaster on the party wall and the chimney breast returns almost never runs true, so a 100mm upstand bedded on silicone is the honest answer here, it rides the bow and hides the junction the worktop can never close on its own. Sockets in a stud wall move more easily than sockets in brick. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. Upstands sit tight because both edges are cut.

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. 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. The ceiling over a staircase limits a standing panel as much as the walls. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. Upstands travel in a crate and can wait on the van, which gives some flexibility a full-height panel does not. A narrow gap between parked cars decides how a panel turns.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and worktop installation. 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. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. The annexe gets the same panel as the main run. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because a cut-out in the wrong place means a new piece. A repeated spec needs a repeatable splashback.

Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. 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. A peninsula end takes a panel on both faces. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

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. 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 breast return is scribed on three edges. The chimney breast recess must be replastered and fully dry, and the hob and extractor positions fixed, before anyone templates a full-height piece into it. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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.

Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. 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. A polished face close to an edge does not survive a knock.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. The stairs come down against the wall the addition opens off, so the doorway into the kitchen is offset and the corner beside it is taken by the cupboard under the flight. Where a client wants a full-height piece behind the hob, it usually sits in the old chimney recess, and that recess is rarely square top to bottom or side to side, so it has to be templated as a trapezium rather than a rectangle. What the plaster is stuck to matters more than its colour.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. 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. It decides whether the run gets one continuous piece or a set of separate lengths with a joint at every obstruction. Set it proud on a subframe and the gap becomes deliberate.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Scribe to the wall rather than stretch the panel.