Pricing a kitchen installation properly

A kitchen install looks like joinery but prices like a small refurbishment: services moves, plastering, flooring, a stone worktop with its own timetable, and a client living out of a microwave who counts every idle day. The quotes that make money treat it that way from the start.

Scope first: fit-only or full install?

The single biggest source of kitchen pricing grief is two people holding two different definitions of the job. "Fitting a kitchen" can mean hanging units on finished walls in a ready room, or it can mean strip-out, rerouting services, plastering, flooring, fitting, worktops, tiling, appliances and decoration. The price difference is a factor of three or four, so nail the definition before a single number is written.

Walk the room with the client and agree in writing where your work starts and ends: who supplies the kitchen, who takes delivery and checks it, whether the floor goes under the units or up to them, who fits and who commissions each appliance, and what happens to the old kitchen. Ten minutes of boundary-drawing here replaces a month of "I assumed you were doing that". The mechanics of recording it are in exclusions and assumptions.

The services layer: where the real money hides

New layouts almost never sit on old services. The sink crosses the room, the hob goes from gas to induction, the island wants power and waste in the middle of the floor. Each move is a real piece of first fix work with making-good behind it:

• Electrics: new circuits for induction hobs and ovens, socket repositioning, under-cabinet lighting, extractor wiring, and the consumer unit implications of an all-electric cooking load. Notifiable work needs a registered electrician and certification.
• Gas: any gas work is Gas Safe territory, priced and certified accordingly, including capping off what is being retired.
• Plumbing and waste: sink and dishwasher moves, and the gradient problem of island drainage, which can mean lifting the floor.
• Ventilation: ducted extractors need a route to outside; core drilling and ducting through two walls is not a ten-minute job.

Price each move as its own line with its making-good (chases plastered, floors patched). This layer routinely accounts for a quarter to a third of a full install, and it is the layer lump-sum quotes swallow whole.

The worktop gap: the week that wrecks programmes

Stone and solid-surface worktops cannot be templated until the base units are fitted, level and fixed, and fabrication then takes several working days, commonly a week or more. That gap is a fact of the material, not a failure, but it must be in both the programme and the price: a return visit for the fitters, a temporary worktop if the client needs a working sink (a spare length of laminate earns its keep here), and the plumber back for final connection after the stone lands.

Quote the gap explicitly. "Units fitted week one; worktops templated day eight, fitted around day fifteen; final plumbing and tiling follow" reads like a builder who has done this before. Silence reads like a fortnight of mystery, and mid-job silence is where client relationships go to die.

Units, worktops and appliances: who supplies what

Count the units off the plan and price fitting per cabinet with an uplift for corners, larders, integrated appliance housings and anything handleless. Wall-unit runs on out-of-plumb walls of old houses eat hours; if the survey shows walls a spirit level laughs at, say so and price the scribing honestly.

The lines that go missing

Beyond the services and the worktop gap, the classic misses on kitchen quotes: strip-out and disposal of the old kitchen, protection of adjacent rooms and floors, plastering after the chases (walls and often the ceiling once the old wall units come off), flooring under or around units and the threshold detail, tiling or splashback with trims, plinth ventilation for integrated appliances, cornice and pelmet fitting, mastic throughout, and a return-visit allowance for the snags that surface once the client starts using the room. None of these is large. Together they are commonly 10 to 15 percent of the job, which for most firms is the entire margin. This is the same disease we diagnosed in estimating mistakes that kill margin: the price was not wrong, it was incomplete.

The reliable cure is to price from a full bill of quantities rather than from memory. QS Quoter builds a draft from a description of the install or the kitchen plan, at your own rates, with services moves, making-good and sundries on their own editable lines, plus a client copy and a private copy showing every rate. The review remains yours, and the structure makes possible omissions visible.