How we spec a kitchen renovation
10% to book. After that you pay for your materials once they are in your house, and for the work once it is finished.
| Spec | What it is | Room it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Shaker | Classic painted shaker, built to last | Rooms up to 4m × 3.5m |
| Slim Shaker | Most popular — the narrow-frame modern look | Rooms up to 5m × 4m |
| Bespoke Handleless | Island kitchens and open-plan rooms | Open-plan rooms, surveyed individually |
Every spec is quoted as one figure covering fixtures, labour, waste removal and VAT, once we have seen the room. See exactly what is in each spec.
Where the money actually goes
Approximate proportions of a typical fitted price. Useful mainly for spotting what a cheaper quote has left out.
- Units and doors≈ 40%
- Rigid-built carcasses and painted doors. Hand-painted slim-frame shaker costs meaningfully more than a factory-sprayed door, and lasts meaningfully longer.
- Fitting labour≈ 25%
- Three weeks of work. Scribing units to walls that are never square is most of what separates a good fit from a visibly average one.
- Worktops≈ 15%
- The single biggest swing in the whole quote. Laminate to templated quartz is a several-thousand-pound step on its own.
- Electrics, plumbing and plastering≈ 12%
- New circuits for appliances, moving the sink, patching the walls the old units were hiding. Routinely absent from showroom quotes.
- Splashback, flooring and sundries≈ 8%
- Tiling or quartz upstand, the floor, sealants, handles, waste removal.
What is the average kitchen remodel cost in the UK?
“Average” is doing a lot of work in that question. National averages fold flat-pack refits in with London island kitchens, and the number that comes out describes nobody's actual kitchen. It is the least useful figure in the whole trade.
The useful question is what a specification costs in your room. In a typical three-bedroom house most people take either the classic painted shaker or the slim-frame doors with quartz worktops. Those are two different pieces of work, and the gap between them is mostly the worktop.
Above that you are usually paying for an island, a knock-through, or a run of tall larder units. Real work with a real reason, not a badge.
Kitchen refurbishment cost — when you do not need new units
If the carcasses are sound and the layout works, replacing doors, worktops and handles takes about a week and costs a fraction of a full refit. That is a genuinely good option and we will tell you when it is the right one.
It stops being the right one when the layout is the problem. New doors on a kitchen where the fridge blocks a drawer and there is nowhere to put a bin will give you a better-looking kitchen that is just as annoying to cook in. At that point you are spending real money to postpone spending more.
The honest test: if what you dislike is how it looks, refurbish. If what you dislike is how it works, replace it.
What pushes a new kitchen cost up
Three things, in order. Worktops — laminate to templated quartz is the biggest single jump available in the whole quote. Moving services — relocating the sink or the hob means new pipework and new circuits, and a layout change that looks minor on a plan is often the most expensive line on the invoice. And tall units — larders and integrated appliance housings are expensive cabinets doing genuinely useful work.
Things that push it up less than people expect: door colour (a hand-painted door is a hand-painted door in any RAL), handles, and the number of drawers.
Things that should push it up and are often quietly left out: the electrics, the plastering behind the old units, and the flooring. If a quote does not mention them, it has not priced them.
How long will I be without a kitchen?
Three weeks for a standard fit, from strip-out to a working kitchen. Bespoke handleless with an island or a knock-through runs to four or five.
You will not be without a sink and a kettle for all of it. Wherever the layout allows, we set up a temporary worktop and keep water available, and we sequence the units so the run with the sink goes back in first. The genuinely awkward stretch is the two or three days around worktop templating, because templating happens after the units are set and the worktop then takes a week to come back.
That templating gap is the honest reason a kitchen is three weeks and not one, and any fitter promising you a week has either not templated a quartz worktop or is planning to fit laminate.
Want the number for your room, not the average?
We survey for free, in your home, and put one written fixed price in front of you. No showroom visit and no sales appointment.
Book a free survey