Splashbacks and upstands in White City

Yes. White City is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W12. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. The crate stays on the van until the route in is clear. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A refuse chute or a service duct takes a corner of the kitchen in several of the standard plans, and neither of them moves. 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. Blown plaster comes off before stone goes on. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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.

Pieces get staged in the ground floor lobby and sent up singly, which needs somewhere to stand them where nobody will walk into 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. Break positions are chosen for the carry. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. Distance from tail lift to door is the whole risk here.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. The cheap way to make eight kitchens look specified.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. 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. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Whoever specifies it signs the drawing.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. There is nearly always a boxed soil stack or a service riser in a corner of the run, and it is rarely mentioned at enquiry. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. Sockets move on paper more easily than in stone.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. 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. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The step and the gap at the car threshold catch a trolley wheel, so the piece comes off the trolley and goes in by hand. 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 tall panel cannot be tilted to clear a turn, so it is sized not to need to.

An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. The units below stay exactly as they are; only the surface is replaced. Building management is often the real gate rather than the bay itself, since the barrier, the shutter and the lift each need someone with a fob. Upstands travel in a crate and can wait on the van, which gives some flexibility a full-height panel does not. A long carry turns a light piece into an awkward one.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. Upstands follow the run exactly, so every internal and external corner is a separate mitred or butted piece. Height is agreed before the cut list closes.