Your kitchen quote is probably right. Your budget probably isn't.

On the most recent one I budgeted twelve thousand pounds. It came to sixteen.

Before anyone reads that as a story about a builder overcharging, it is the opposite. The kitchen quote itself was close to the final price. The four thousand came from plumbing, gas work and electrical work, all of it caused by changing the layout and the appliances, and none of it knowable by anybody until the old cabinets and the old flooring came out.

That is the thing worth understanding before you spend anything. The part of a kitchen you can get a firm price on is the part you can see.

The gas pipe we could not find

Here is what that meant in practice.

The old kitchen had an electric hob. We wanted gas. Nobody could tell us whether a gas pipe already existed behind the cabinets, so the honest answer at quoting time was that we would find out when we took everything out.

We took everything out. There was a pipe, which was the good news. It was a long way from where we wanted the stove, which was not, so it had to be extended, and extended in a way that was both safe and did not get in the way of fitting the units.

Then the electrics. Under BS 7671, the wiring regulations, sockets and cooker switches should sit at least 300mm horizontally from the edge of a hob or oven, and nothing may be installed directly above or behind a cooking appliance. A socket under a gas hob has to be a particular type, fitted by a certified electrician. If your walls are concrete or brick, putting all of that right makes a lot of mess.

None of that was anybody's fault, and none of it could have been in a quote.

Take the old kitchen out before you design the new one

This is the part that runs against how kitchens are usually sold, and it is the single most useful thing on this page.

The normal order is that you design the kitchen, get a price against the design, and then discover what is behind the walls. Do it the other way round. Rip the old kitchen out first, look at what you have actually got, find out what needs repairing, and design once you know.

Every kitchen I have been involved in that went smoothly went in this order:

Take the old kitchen out. Design the new one, now that you can see what you are working with. Do the electrical work next, because it damages the walls and the walls have to be made good before anything else happens. Then the plumbing routes and the extraction pipe, which need drilling. Then the kitchen fitting and the appliances. Flooring last.

Uneven walls and floors belong in that first step too. They have to be sorted before the units go on, which is another reason the rip-out comes before the design rather than after it.

What is actually separate

People talk about "the kitchen quote" as though it covers the room. In my experience the separate jobs are: flooring, electrical, plumbing, gas, appliances, making good the walls, and often the worktop.

Old kitchen removal is the one to ask about specifically. Some firms do it and some do not, and if yours does not, that is a separate job with a skip attached.

Flooring deserves its own warning. One of my kitchens had granite flooring, which meant drilling, levelling and a great deal of work before anything else could start. A difficult floor is not a detail at the end of the job. It is its own project, and you want to know about it before you commit.

So what you are really running is several jobs in parallel, close together, that have to line up. Which brings us to the thing that actually delays kitchens.

What holds a kitchen up

Not the deliveries, in my experience. Most things arrived on the day they were supposed to, and if you order appliances from reputable companies in the UK they turn up fast.

What holds a kitchen up is the cabinets, and getting the trades to line up with each other. Electrician, plumber, gas engineer, kitchen fitter, flooring, and whoever is doing the walls and decorating. Each of them needs a date, and each date depends on the one before it finishing.

That is why the order above matters so much. When one trade slips, the next one cannot simply start early.

Getting a quote worth comparing

I got three quotes on the last kitchen and they came out similar. The one we chose won because the firm had a good connection for the quartz we wanted, so the package worked out better. The headline number was not what decided it.

To get quotes that are worth comparing at all, do this first.

Know exactly what you want and draw it. The kitchen firm will sketch their version too, and comparing the two is where the real conversation happens. Know the prices for the different cabinets, the doors, the handles, the drawers, the colour, the material, because those are what move a quote up and down. Sort the worktop in parallel rather than afterwards, so you know what the whole package costs rather than one part of it. And ask for samples, colours and catalogues, so you get a real feel for what you are choosing instead of a picture of it.

The worktop, and why it belongs at the very start

Stone and quartz worktops are templated after the units are fitted, not before. The template goes off, the worktop is made, and it comes back, so there is a stretch in the middle of the job with the cabinets in and nothing on top of them.

That gap is a planning problem, and it is a solvable one. There are two ways to keep it short. Use a firm that supplies the worktop as part of the kitchen, which is what I did, and why mine was three working days. Or use a worktopper who comes to the house and cuts on site.

What turns three days into weeks is leaving the worktop until halfway through the job. Sort it at the very beginning, alongside the design. Get the samples, get the contact, and find out what their availability actually is and how they work. Do that and the worktop is a non-event. Start thinking about it when the units are already going in and you will wait.

The sink caused no problem at all, which surprises people. It was measured at the design stage and ordered to the dimensions we were given, so it simply fitted when the time came.

Two months without a kitchen

That is how long ours was out of use, start to finish.

We got away with it because we have a utility room, and we did the utility room first specifically so we could do most of our cooking and washing up in there for the duration. Nobody had to move out.

If you have a room that can take a kettle, a microwave and a sink, do that room first. It changes what the two months feel like.

What people underestimate is simpler than any tip. It takes time, there will be surprises, and the job asks you to be patient and trust the process. Knowing that in advance is most of what gets you through it.

What it does when you sell

A new kitchen adds value. I have not seen an exception.

There is one warning worth taking seriously though, and it is about colour rather than money. I know a property with purple cabinets, black worktops and purple walls. It made a lot of buyers hesitant, because most people's taste is not your taste. If there is any chance of selling in the foreseeable future, go with natural colours and put the personality somewhere you can change cheaply.

Brand matters much less than people expect. Buyers care that it looks good and has been done properly, not whose name is on the doors. The exception is at the very top of the market, where an expensive house means buyers who care about everything.

When not to do the whole thing

It comes down to budget more than anything else.

If you cannot afford the kitchen you actually want, doing part of it well beats doing all of it cheaply. New doors, new handles and a new worktop can transform a kitchen that is structurally fine, particularly alongside new flooring. The carcasses are usually the part nobody sees and the part that lasts.

Stretching to a full kitchen you have compromised on is how people end up wanting to do it again in five years.