Kitchen Renovations near you

For a kitchen inside the existing house, almost never. The Planning Portal's position is that a planning application for installing a kitchen or bathroom is generally not required unless it forms part of a house extension. Replacing units, moving the sink, changing the layout and re-flooring are not development in the planning sense.

The exceptions are worth taking seriously, because two of them carry consequences well beyond a refused application. In a listed building you should consult the local planning authority before you start: listed building consent is required for work affecting the building's character as one of special architectural or historic interest, internal work included, and carrying it out without consent beforehand is a criminal offence. In a flat or maisonette, the householder permitted development rights that cover houses simply do not apply.

The Planning Portal states that work to refit a kitchen with new units and fittings does not generally require building regulations approval, although the drainage or electrical work forming part of that refit may. The threshold moves when the kitchen goes somewhere it has never been: providing a kitchen in a room that did not have one is likely to need approval, so that the room has adequate ventilation and drainage and meets requirements for structural stability, electrical safety and fire safety.

Removing the wall between a kitchen and a dining room is a different matter again. That is structural work: the opening needs a beam sized by someone competent to size it, with bearings and support below, and it is building control work from the outset. The same applies to forming a wide opening into a new extension. Electrical work interacts with the structure here too — Approved Document P notes that Part A governs the depth of chases in walls and the size of holes and notches in floor joists, which is exactly where kitchen cabling and pipework tend to go.

You can use either your local authority's building control service or a private registered building control approver. Either way, ask your builder which route they are using and make sure the job ends with a completion certificate, because without approval you will not have the certificates of compliance you may need when selling.

Gas is the part of a kitchen where the law is unambiguous. Regulation 3 of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 provides that no person shall carry out any work in relation to a gas fitting unless competent to do so, and that an employer or self-employed person must be a member of a class of persons approved by the Health and Safety Executive — in practice, the Gas Safe Register. Disconnecting a hob to fit a worktop, moving the supply to a new island, capping off a redundant pipe or relocating the meter are all gas work.

Checking is quick and worth doing on the day. HSE points homeowners to the Gas Safe Register's check service, where the licence number from the engineer's ID card brings up their photograph and the details of their qualifications. The back of the card lists what the engineer is actually qualified to work on, so confirm the category covers the appliance in your kitchen rather than just that the card exists. Gas Safe Register is also one of the government-authorised competent person schemes, so a registered engineer can self-certify the building regulations side of the work.

Approved Document P covers electrical safety in dwellings in England, and it defines a short list of notifiable work: installing a new circuit, replacing a consumer unit or fuse box, and altering existing circuits in a special location. In England, special locations are the spaces around baths and showers, so a kitchen is not itself a special location and adding a socket to an existing kitchen circuit is generally not notifiable.

A real kitchen refit is a different story, because it usually brings new circuits with it — a dedicated supply for an electric oven or induction hob, new ring or radial circuits for worktop sockets, a rewire back to a consumer unit that then needs replacing. All of that is notifiable, and it must be certified. The straightforward route is an electrician registered with a competent person scheme such as NICEIC or NAPIT, who can self-certify compliance instead of you applying to building control.

The Planning Portal's guidance is that any new kitchen, bathroom or shower room, utility room or toilet should be provided with a means of extract ventilation to reduce condensation and remove smells, with the detail set out in Approved Document F. Where a kitchen is being refurbished rather than created, the requirement is to ensure that existing extract ventilation is retained or replaced, so taking out a working extractor and not putting one back is a step in the wrong direction.

This matters more in British housing than the paperwork suggests. Cooking is one of the largest sources of moisture in a home, and in a solid-walled Victorian or Edwardian house with cold external walls, that moisture finds the coldest surface and condenses there. A recirculating hood with a charcoal filter deals with smells but returns the water vapour to the room; ducting to the outside is what actually removes it. If the layout is being redrawn anyway, that is the moment to plan a duct run rather than to discover later that there is nowhere for one to go.

Describing a kitchen as a single figure is meaningless, because two kitchens of identical size can differ by a multiple depending on how much of the building has to change around them. The variables below are the ones that move a British quotation most, and they are worth settling before you compare tenders, so that everyone is pricing the same job.

When you are ready to gather quotations, LokalMatch lets you set out the kitchen once — the room, whether the layout or the services are moving, your postcode and your timing — and matched kitchen fitters and builders contact you themselves; the professionals pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not do the work, does not set or influence prices, and does not vet, rank or recommend the businesses that respond, so comparing their registrations, insurance and written scope is still your job.

There are three separate layers of protection on a kitchen and they are easy to muddle. The first is your statutory rights: under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 the fitting must be carried out with reasonable care and skill, and if it is not, you can require repeat performance at the trader's cost or a reduction in price. Those rights cannot be excluded by anything in the contract.

The second is the trader's own guarantee. TrustMark registered businesses are expected to provide a minimum two-year guarantee, backed by insurance that covers workmanship, the rectification of defects and non-compliance with the Building Regulations if the business stops trading — which is the scenario an ordinary written guarantee does nothing about. Where a complaint cannot be settled with the business or its scheme provider, TrustMark members are subject to the Dispute Resolution Ombudsman.

The third is product warranty: units, worktops and appliances carry manufacturer guarantees with their own conditions, often including how they were installed. Keep the paperwork together with the electrical installation certificate and the Gas Safe record, because those are the documents that show the controlled work was done properly.