Kitchen installation and appliance connection

We install and connect the kitchens we build ourselves: the carcases set level and joined, the worktop cut and laid, the facades hung and adjusted, the appliances put in and hooked up, and the room left clean and ready to cook in. A kitchen made to your measurements arrives as a load of parts, and the fitting is what turns them into furniture that sits true on a floor that is never perfectly level.

The work is for private flats and houses in Moscow and the near belt, whether you are running the renovation yourself or working through a designer. Because the furniture comes out of our own workshop, an odd depth or a wall that refuses to be square is an ordinary thing to design around, not a reason for a surcharge at the end.

What the installation and connection work covers

The fitting follows one order, and each stage leans on the one before it. The carcases come in first. They are assembled, levelled in two directions and joined to each other, so that the whole run carries the worktop together instead of every unit standing on its own feet. Nothing is fixed to a wall before it is level, because a wall in a flat is a guide to nothing. Scribes and plinths are marked and cut to the shape of the room at this point rather than cut to a drawing.

The worktop is next, and it is the only part of the kitchen cut to the room on site. Joints, the cut-out for the sink, the cut-out for the hob, the edge that meets the wall: all of it is measured once the carcases are standing where they will stay. Then the facades go on and are adjusted until the gaps between doors are equal and two doors meeting on a corner swing past each other without touching.

A kitchen sits level not because the units are straight, but because someone took the floor seriously before fixing the first one.

A hob, an oven and a dishwasher are connected to the outlets put in place at the wiring stage, and each one is checked working before we leave: every burner, the oven on two settings, the machine through a short cycle with water running, so a fitting mistake shows up while there is still light and someone in the flat, not a week later.

An extractor is either ducted to the shaft or left running in recirculation, depending on what the building gives you, and that is settled at the design stage rather than on the day. Where the hob burns gas, the connection itself belongs to a qualified gas engineer: we leave the cut-out made and the unit accessible so that they can do their part in one visit.

What has to be ready on site before the fitters arrive

The room has to be finished behind and under the furniture. Plaster or plasterboard done, floor level and laid, all the wet and dirty work behind you, and the walls dry, because a carcase fixed to a damp wall keeps that damp. The last coat of paint, the skirting and the decoration near the worktop can wait until after us.

Wiring and plumbing have to sit where the furniture will stand, not where they happened to be left. This is the part of a project that pays for itself: outlet heights behind the oven and the dishwasher, the waste for the sink, the drain for the machine, a supply for the hood, and space left in the run for the boiler. We mark all of this at the design stage, and your own trades set it before the fitting starts.

Think about the way in as well. A worktop is a long, heavy piece, and a stairwell, a lift car or a narrow doorway can decide whether it arrives whole or in two pieces with a joint in the middle. Water and power need to be working on site, and the packing needs a corner to sit in until the end of the day.

One thing we ask for plainly: no other trades in the room while the kitchen is being fitted. Fitters and a tiler working over the same two square metres cost each other time, and dust from a grinder settles in every hinge and runner that has just been adjusted.

Where the price of installation comes from

Installation is priced for the room, not from a catalogue line. What moves it is the length of the run and how many units stand in it, how many cut-outs the worktop needs, whether that worktop goes down as one piece or arrives with a joint behind the sink, and how many appliances are set in and checked. Depth belongs here too, and we mean an honest 60 cm against a shallower run, where every edge, every plinth and every scribe changes length with it.

Then the room itself. A dry, finished, empty room is cheaper to fit than one where a wall has to be made square again, and the day is paid for either way. This is where we say you can save: do the preparation carefully with your own trades, and do not pay a furniture maker to do work a plasterer does faster.

What does not add to the price is an unusual size. Non-standard heights and depths come from our own workshop, so a raised base run or a shallow pantry column costs its material and its hours, not a premium for falling outside somebody's range. A quotation is worked out for your room, and we would rather show you the lines that carry it than a single number.

The price of a fitting is settled before anyone opens a toolbox: it is settled by what the room looked like when the fitters arrived.

Comparing two quotations, put them on one sheet and ask each one the same questions. Does it include assembly and levelling, the worktop cut-outs, the appliance connections, the plinth, the scribes and the sealing? A quotation that leaves those out is not a cheaper kitchen, it is a kitchen with the difficult part still to be paid for.