Splashbacks and upstands in West Wickham

Yes. West Wickham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR4. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. 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. Distance from tail lift to door is the whole risk here. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The boiler has usually been moved out to the garage or the utility, leaving a capped flue and a run of dead pipework in the kitchen wall. These kitchens are nearly always retiled at least twice, and stripping the old tiles takes the bottom course of plaster with it because the original laminate top ran underneath the tiles rather than up to them. Sockets in a stud wall move more easily than sockets in brick. 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. 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 breast return is scribed on three edges.

The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. 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 break goes where a joint reads as deliberate. 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. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. A long carry turns a light piece into an awkward one.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. Upstands turn batch offcuts into finished rooms. 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. The cheap way to make eight kitchens look specified.

On a book-matched pair the halves are laid out so the mirror line runs down the length of the piece, and once that line is set the top cannot be turned round to suit anything else. 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. Scribe to the wall rather than stretch the panel. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. 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. Set it proud on a subframe and the gap becomes deliberate. The old tiling must be off and the wall made good and dry before templating, not on fitting day. Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. Full-height panels need the wall made good first, which is another trade and another timescale. Full height is decided before fabrication, not after.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. 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. An upstand rides what a panel exposes.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Air bricks that once ventilated the original floor now open into the extension, and one of them is generally sitting behind a base unit. 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. What the plaster is stuck to matters more than its colour.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. 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.

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. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Downstairs the hall and dining room are boarded but the kitchen was laid solid from the start, so the room sits on a different construction from the one beside it. The ragged band left when old tiles and laminate come off together is what usually decides upstand over full height. A reveal in a thick wall changes where the panel stops.