Kitchen Fitters in Newcastle upon Tyne

Kitchen fitting in Newcastle upon Tyne

Newcastle asks a kitchen fitter three different questions depending on the postcode, and the honest version of this page is that the answer is mostly about access and extraction rather than about units.

The city's defining housing type is the Tyneside flat: two front doors, one upstairs, one down, and a kitchen usually in the rear addition. Add the Victorian terraces of Jesmond and Heaton, the larger interwar property at Gosforth, and the converted and purpose-built apartments along the Quayside and Ouseburn, and you have four jobs that share a name and very little else.

The short version

• Five to ten working days on site, with the count on the quote rather than left vague.
• In upper flats the stair decides the specification — worktops and large appliances are checked against the route in before they are ordered.
• In apartments the building's own rules come first: working hours, lift use, and whether anything may be drilled through the structure.
• Stone worktops are templated after the units are in, which adds a planned gap of one to two weeks.

What each kind of job involves

What Newcastle property throws up

Tyneside flats, and the stair. The rear addition kitchen is the standard job in Heaton, Sandyford and much of Walker and Byker. The room itself is usually straightforward. What is not straightforward is that every unit, appliance and worktop goes up and down a shared stair with a turn in it, and that the flat below is somebody's ceiling, so waste runs and any new drainage want thinking about rather than assuming. Both of those are survey questions and neither is a reason to do less.

Extraction. The rate and the duct come from Approved Document F rather than from what a solid wall will allow, which is exactly why it is difficult here. This is the hardest single detail in the city's older stock and it is the one most often quietly dropped. Getting a properly vented extractor out of a solid-walled flat or terrace takes a real route, and a recirculating hood is the easy answer rather than the right one. In a conservation area, and Jesmond and much of Grainger Town are conservation areas, a new external vent on a visible elevation is a consent question before it is a cost.

Apartments on the Quayside and at Ouseburn. Concrete floors, no chimney, frequently no external wall to duct through, and a managing agent with rules about hours and drilling. None of this stops a good kitchen going in. All of it changes the design, and it needs to change the design at the start.

Jesmond and Heaton terraces. High-ceilinged rooms, solid walls, services run in later and not always well, and a large share of the stock let rather than owned. The recurring find is that what is behind the units bears very little relation to what the plan assumed.

Gosforth and the outer suburbs. Larger interwar semis and detached houses, conventional rooms, and the town's strongest market for opening up the kitchen into the dining room. Whether the wall is load-bearing decides the cost, and if it is, a structural engineer sizes the beam and building control is notified.

Parking and permits. In Jesmond, Heaton and Sandyford the controlled zones are real and a van outside all week is not a given. We arrange it rather than leaving it to the day.

Buying from a showroom, or from us

Showrooms design well, and a plan drawn with a designer is often better than one drawn by a fitter. There is no reason to pretend otherwise.

What a showroom cannot do is see the room as built. Plans arrive squared and level; Newcastle's older rooms are neither, and the appliance positions frequently assume a supply or a waste that is not there. We fit customer-supplied kitchens regularly, and the only ask is that we see the plan before the order goes in, because that is the point at which a problem is free to fix.

Moving the sink is altered drainage and therefore building regulations work through the city council; in a Tyneside flat the same move crosses between two dwellings, where the separation standards in the Approved Documents apply as well. A new circuit for an induction hob is notifiable under Part P, certified by registered electricians.

When we are the wrong choice

A new kitchen is not the answer to every kitchen problem, and there are jobs where somebody else is the better call.

• If the doors and worktop are sound and it is the layout you dislike, a replacement door and worktop set costs a fraction of a refit.
• If you want the cheapest possible fit, we are not it. We scribe to the floor and duct the extractor properly, and both show in the price.
• If the design cannot physically reach the flat, we will say so at the quote rather than after the delivery, and that is not always what people want to hear.
• If a vented extractor needs a new opening on a listed or conservation-area frontage, that is a consent question first and a quote second.
• If the managing agent has not agreed the works, get that in writing before we book a start date. We would rather wait a fortnight than be stopped on day one.

How the job runs

We survey the room as built, confirm what is structural, and check the route in for the things that have to get in. You get one written fixed price listing what is and is not included, which you can accept online without a doorstep conversation. We book a start date and confirm the day before.

Strip-out, first fix, units, worktop, appliances, tiling and making good run in sequence with our own trades, photographed as they go, with the site cleared each evening, which in a flat with a shared stair means the stair as well as the kitchen.

Where a wall is coming out, the building and renovation work is quoted in the same document rather than separately. We also fit bathrooms in Newcastle, and the same survey covers both if you are doing them together.