Countertop Installation With the Backsplash Planned In

Template a Wall, Not a Tile Face

A digital template is only as honest as the surfaces it touches. Point a laser at a kitchen that still has its original four inch tile splash and the machine faithfully records the front of that tile, which on a mud set job can sit three quarters of an inch proud of the drywall behind it.

Fabricate to that and you get a counter sized to a wall that is about to disappear. When the tile comes off during install, the back edge of the slab is left floating short, and every fix from that point is a bodge.

So the first visit here is usually demo, not measurement. Plastic on the floor, splash off, adhesive scraped back, and then we template.

Cabinets Come First

Before anything gets measured we shim and check the cabinet run. The working tolerance is about an eighth of an inch over ten feet, and a run that is out beyond that shows up as a rocking slab or a joint that opens at one end. Riverside tract kitchens on slab on grade are usually close, but the older homes near Victoria Avenue often have floors that have moved, and a run that was level when it was hung in the seventies may not be now.

Levelling a cabinet run after the stone is on it is not really possible. It takes twenty minutes beforehand.

Slab Layout and Seams

We lay out on the actual slab in the yard rather than nesting on a screen. Where a seam has to fall, it falls somewhere defensible: behind the sink where the material is narrow and the eye is busy, in a corner, or in line with a cabinet stile. Not across the middle of an island, and not at the front edge of a cooktop cutout where the slab is weakest.

If the material has real movement in it, and a lot of the granite and quartzite coming through the Riverside slab yards does, we mark the direction we want it to run and cut to that. Movement that fights the length of the room is the sort of detail nobody can name but everybody notices.

Cutouts and Reinforcement

Undermount sink cutouts are made and polished in the shop, not on your cabinets with a grinder. The front rail between the sink and the edge is the thinnest piece of stone in the kitchen, so it gets rodded, and on longer runs of quartz we will laminate the rail rather than trust the rod alone.

Cooktop cutouts get their corners radiused. A square internal corner is a crack waiting for a hot pan and a cold morning.

Then the Splash

Because the wall is bare and flat by the time the counters land, whatever goes above them has somewhere proper to start. A four inch deck splash cut from the same slab, a full height piece vein matched off the offcut, or tile set the following week. That decision can be made late, but the preparation for it cannot.

Edge profiles, sealing schedules for natural stone and the caulk joint at the wall are all covered on the day. Call (951) 795-0209 to get a template visit booked.