Planning a kitchen renovation on a realistic budget

Start with the room you actually have

Before you fall in love with a showroom display, measure your space properly and think about how you move through it. In Edinburgh's tenements and Victorian terraces, that often means working around chimney breasts, box presses, original coombs and awkward returns. In the newer estates across West Lothian and Midlothian, you may be dealing with a standard 3.6m by 2.7m box where the sink, boiler and waste are already fixed in place.

Layout is the one thing you cannot cheaply change later. Moving a soil pipe or a boiler flue across a room can add hundreds before a single cabinet goes in, and in a stone-built property it can be considerably more. So decide early on:

• Where the sink, hob and fridge sit in relation to each other
• Whether a peninsula or island genuinely fits, allowing 1,000mm of clear walkway
• How many people will be cooking, and where they will stand
• Where the washing machine, bins and recycling will live

A good local designer will draw this up for you and it is money well spent, even if you fit the kitchen yourself.

Spend the money where your hands go

Two things decide whether a kitchen still feels good after five years: the carcasses and the worktops. Everything else is decoration.

Buy the best cabinets your budget allows. Look for 18mm solid carcasses rather than thin flat-pack panels, metal drawer boxes rather than plastic, and hinges with a proper brand name on them. Drawer stacks cost more than cupboards but they are far easier to live with, particularly in a narrow Edinburgh kitchen where you cannot open a door and reach past it at the same time. If you can only afford drawers in one place, put them under the hob and next to the sink.

Worktops take the daily battering. Laminate at £60 to £120 per linear metre installed is perfectly respectable and has improved enormously. Quartz runs roughly £300 to £500 per linear metre fitted, and solid timber sits somewhere between the two but needs re-oiling once or twice a year. Avoid anything that chips easily next to a Belfast sink, and remember that an upstand in the same material as the worktop usually costs less than tiling to the same height.

Save where it will not be felt

Appliances are where budgets quietly escape. You do not need the top of the range, but you do want a recognisable mid-market brand with parts available. A few sensible trade-offs:

• Skip the integrated dishwasher if a freestanding one fits and is £200 cheaper
• Choose a single fan oven over a double unless you genuinely cook for crowds
• Buy your own handles, taps and bin pulls online rather than through the kitchen supplier
• Use paint or a simple upstand instead of tiling the whole splashback
• Keep the existing floor if it is sound, or lay LVT over it rather than retiling

Lighting is worth a modest spend though. Three or four well-placed spots and a strip under the wall units will do more for how the room feels than any amount of fancy tiling.

What it realistically costs in Edinburgh and the Lothians

For a mid-range kitchen of around ten to twelve units, fitted, expect somewhere between £12,000 and £25,000 including labour. A rough split looks like this:

• Cabinets and doors: £4,000 to £8,000
• Worktops: £1,500 to £4,000
• Appliances: £1,000 to £3,000
• Fitting, electrics, plumbing and plastering: £4,000 to £8,000

Add at least 10 per cent contingency, and more if your property is old. Access matters here in a way it does not elsewhere. A fourth-floor tenement flat with no lift means every cabinet carried up a shared stair, and you may need a parking suspension from the council. In a conservation area or a listed building in the New Town or Old Town, external changes such as flue terminals or window alterations need consent, which takes time.

Older homes need a bit of forethought

Edinburgh's older housing stock is wonderful and demanding. Before units go in, check:

• Whether the existing extractor duct actually goes outside, and where it can be routed
• If there is any damp behind the units or under the sink, and deal with it first
• Whether the floor is level — tenement floors rarely are, and units can be packed and scribed
• Whether the boiler can be relocated, or whether you are designing around it
• That services can reach the new positions without lifting half the floor

Ventilation is not glamorous, but a kitchen with a proper extractor and a working trickle vent will stay in better condition than one without.

Sequence the work sensibly

Strip out, first fix electrics and plumbing, plaster, then units, then worktops, then tiling and finishing. Expect two to three weeks for a straightforward fit and four to six if there is structural work or a full rewire.

Set up a temporary kitchen before work starts: kettle, microwave, fridge in the hall or dining room, and a washing-up bowl. Plan for a week or two of takeaway and a bit of chaos. It is far easier to accept that upfront than to be surprised by it halfway through.

Get the layout and carcasses right, keep your nerve on the worktops, save cheerfully on the rest, and you will end up with a kitchen that works hard for years without a second mortgage.