Kitchens in Basildon

Ask anyone living in an estate built house in Basildon what they would change first and the kitchen is usually the answer. Homes laid out from the 1950s onwards typically put a compact galley off the hall, closed away from both the dining room and the garden, because that is how kitchens were used at the time. Tastes have moved on and the rooms have not, which is why so much of the kitchen work we do in the town starts with the layout rather than the units.

Opening up without guessing at the structure

The wall between kitchen and dining room is the obvious candidate, and on many of these houses it is carrying load, so it comes out with a properly sized beam and padstones rather than a hopeful lintel. We establish which walls are structural before design work starts, particularly in homes built by non traditional methods where the load path is not what the floor plan suggests. Opening the kitchen straight into the hall takes more thought again, because the staircase has to keep a safe route out of the house, and that shapes where the opening can go. Chimney breasts serving old solid fuel or back boiler flues are another common find, and removing one means supporting whatever is left above it.

Services, meters and pipework of a certain age

Behind the units, older estate housing tends to throw up the same list. Consumer units and meters tucked into hall cupboards, circuits that predate current regulations, gravity fed hot water, and waste runs that all want to reach the one original soil stack. Where a back boiler or an old cylinder is being taken out, the heating layout changes with it. Having electricians and plumbers on the same team means first fix is coordinated with the joinery instead of being squeezed in afterwards, and notifiable work is certified properly.

Finding the extra room

Space for an island or a table everyone can sit at rarely exists in the original footprint, so it has to come from somewhere. Integral garages on 1970s semis convert well and often become a utility that keeps the noisy appliances out of the main room. Side infills make use of the generous plot widths found across much of the town's estate housing. Even without building anything, moving a door, blocking an unused second entrance or borrowing depth from an oversized hall cupboard can free the run of worktop a kitchen has always been short of. Where the ambition is bigger, a rear extension opens the whole back of the house to the garden and lets the kitchen, dining and living space share one outlook.

Fitting into a real house

Houses of this age rarely offer square corners or level floors, so units are packed and scribed to the room rather than forced into it, and worktops are templated once everything else is true. Tiling, flooring, decoration and the final connections are completed by the same people who started the job. See our full kitchen fitting service for how an installation is planned, browse the rest of what we do across Basildon, and request a free quote when you are ready. We are fully insured, our workmanship is guaranteed and we are rated 4.9 out of 5.