Kitchens in Colchester

The kitchen is usually the room in a Colchester house that has been altered most often and least carefully. Boilers get moved, waste pipes get extended, circuits get added, and a later doorway blocks the one wall that would have worked. A good kitchen job therefore begins behind the units, with the services, the floor and the structure, long before anyone chooses a door style. Our kitchen fitting service covers all of it under one team, so the plumbing, electrics, plastering and joinery are the responsibility of the same firm.

Terrace kitchens and the back addition

In New Town and the streets towards the Avenue of Remembrance, the kitchen sits in the narrow rear addition, sharing that small space with the back door, the boiler, the meter cupboard and often a single skin outside wall that is cold and prone to condensation. There are three sensible moves. You can open the addition into the main rear room by forming a structural opening, you can take the kitchen out into a filled side return, or you can replan tightly within the existing footprint and win back space by relocating the boiler and rerouting the waste. Whichever route you take, the solid floor usually needs levelling, the old plaster on those outside walls is rarely worth keeping, and a kitchen with modern appliances needs proper circuits rather than the tired wiring often found in houses of that age. Extract ducting is worth solving early, because in a terrace the shortest route out is not always the one available.

Villa kitchens and open plan estate homes

Lexden's Edwardian villas offer the opposite problem, plenty of space but rooms that no longer relate to each other. Original sculleries, pantries and rear lobbies can be reworked into one generous kitchen with a separate utility, which keeps the noisy machines out of the room you live in while retaining the high ceilings and window proportions that make those houses worth owning. On the estates at Highwoods, Stanway, Prettygate and the newer streets on redeveloped garrison land, the usual ambition is to remove the wall between kitchen and dining room. Blockwork and timber stud partitions take fixings well and the layouts are regular, but the wall in question is often loadbearing, so a designed beam and proper padstones are needed. Homes in the rental streets near the University of Essex have a different brief again, where hard wearing worktops, easily replaced doors and sensible appliance choices matter far more than showpiece detail.

Historic buildings, and what changes the cost

Inside the Dutch Quarter and the older streets within the Roman walls, kitchens have to be fitted to buildings that are not square, not level and not always willing. Units get scribed rather than simply screwed to a wall, worktops are templated after the carcasses are in, and deep chasing of historic fabric for pipes and cables is avoided in favour of surface routes hidden in joinery. New extract terminals through a historic elevation can need consent, so that gets checked before anything is ordered. Cost across all of these houses is driven by how far services have to move, whether a structural opening is involved, the state of the floor and walls once the old kitchen is out, and the specification of worktops and appliances rather than by the units alone. If the bathroom is next on the list, the same team can take on the bathroom at the same time. We work throughout Colchester and quote free of charge, so tell us what you have in mind.