Splashbacks and upstands in Northwood Hills

Yes. Northwood Hills is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA6. It is run from the High Wycombe side, covering Buckinghamshire & Berkshire. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. One trip is always better than three. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Access is a question about the plot rather than the house: a narrow frontage between older buildings with nowhere obvious to stand a van. 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. Decided before fabrication starts. On these streets the van often cannot park level, so decide your lift-off point before you arrive with a loaded A-frame.

The Joel Street parade is busy with short-stay bays, but the residential streets have drives. The ground genuinely slopes here, which makes trolley work harder than the map suggests. A car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a three-metre worktop however it is stood, and there is no trimming it on the landing. 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. That is agreed at template, not on fitting day. Tell us what the approach looks like when you book the template and it gets built into the day rather than discovered on it.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Sockets final before template. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because a cut-out in the wrong place means a new piece. Same batch, same run, same day.

A galley run down a side-return extension usually measures longer than a slab will give in one length, so a join is designed in from the start rather than discovered. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. The joint to the worktop is siliconed, never grouted. 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. 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. 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. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Same slab run as the tops.