The short answer: in what order to renovate a kitchen
The right order is: brief, survey, layout, services, specific appliance models, cabinetry drawings, first-fix works, finishes, installation of units and appliances, and final check. Skip a step and you almost always end up remaking a cabinet or opening a wall.
The kitchen is the densest room in a home. Within a few metres you have water, drainage, extraction, gas or high electrical loads, cabinetry made to the millimetre and expensive surfaces. That is why decisions here depend on each other far more than in a bedroom or living room.
Step 1. The brief: how you actually cook
Start with answers, not magazine photos. How many people cook at the same time. Whether you cook every day or mostly reheat. Whether you want a second oven, a wine fridge or a large refrigerator. Where the coffee machine, toaster and blender you use every morning will live. How much crockery and food you need to store.
Those answers set the length of worktop and the number of drawers and tall units. A one-page brief saves weeks of back and forth with the designer and the joiner.
Step 2. Survey and layout
The survey records more than wall lengths. It captures everything that limits the layout: soil stacks, ventilation shafts, windows and radiators, walls out of plumb and uneven floors. In an older Eixample building a wall can lean by a couple of centimetres over its height, and bespoke cabinetry has to absorb that.
The layout is built around three zones: storage, washing and cooking, with clear worktop between them and a walkway that is not blocked when the dishwasher is open. Whether to open the kitchen to the living room or keep it closed, island or peninsula, are separate decisions with their own articles. What matters here is that the layout is signed off before anything else.
Step 3. Services: what to move and what it costs
The sink can move away from the stack, but the waste pipe needs a fall, which means raising the floor or building a boxing. The extractor needs a duct to the outside or a recirculating solution, which changes the model you can use. The induction hob and oven need their own circuits of the right cable size.
If the flat has gas, decide at the start whether to keep it. Switching to induction simplifies the project, but the decision has to be made before first-fix. Every relocated point costs time and money, so it is itemised separately in the quote instead of disappearing into a generic plumbing line.
Step 4. Appliances and cabinetry
Bespoke units are designed around specific models: opening sizes, ventilation gaps, door swing. Writing integrated fridge on a drawing tells the joiner nothing. So the models are chosen before the cabinetry is drawn, and if one changes, the drawings are revised before they go to the factory. There is a separate article on choosing appliances before kitchen manufacture.
Final drawings are approved once first-fix is complete and the walls are true. A check survey on finished walls is essential: a drawing based on the old state will be out by several centimetres.
Step 5. Site works and finishes
On site the sequence runs: strip-out, water, waste and electrical runs, plastering and levelling, screed, floor finish, painting, cabinet installation, worktop fitting, appliance connection and, if it is stone or glass, the splashback.
Stone or porcelain worktops are templated on the installed carcasses. Their fabrication adds a pause to the programme, and that pause should be planned from day one. Look at samples of stone, fronts and tiles in person, in daylight and under the lighting the kitchen will actually have.
The mistakes that cost the most
Sockets placed to the old scheme, with the coffee machine and toaster ending up in another corner. An extractor bought without checking the duct run. Drawers that hit the oven handle or a radiator. Flooring laid only up to the cabinets, which rules out ever rearranging the kitchen. A finish chosen on screen that turns out to be a different tone in real life.
In the Urgel flat in the Eixample, 109.80 m², the kitchen was opened to the living room, with herringbone parquet in the day area. In a layout like that the junction between kitchen floor and parquet matters a great deal, as does a powerful yet quiet extractor, because smells and noise go straight into the living space.
How to start with us
Send us a floor plan or photos of the kitchen, the appliances you want and the finish level you have in mind. As a price guide for renovation, excluding VAT: Basic from €1,000/m², Standard from €2,000/m², Luxury from €3,000/m²; the exact figure for your kitchen comes from the quote after a site visit and measurements. We reply within an hour and run the project in Spanish or Russian.