Kitchens in Northampton, priced in writing before anything starts.
Most Northampton kitchen enquiries turn out to be structural. What people want is the wall between the kitchen and the rear addition gone, and the units follow.
On the terraces that rear addition was built lighter than the main house and frequently on shallower foundations. Opening into it is routine work and we do it constantly, but the beam has to be sized for what is genuinely bearing on it, and the padstones and the bearing checked rather than assumed. That is a Building Regulations matter and we arrange the inspection and see it signed off.
There is a Northampton specific wrinkle in the older streets. Where a terrace once had a working yard behind it, later owners have often built into that yard in stages, so what looks like one rear addition may be two or three separate builds of different ages and different quality, meeting at junctions nobody detailed. Opening through that needs the sequence understood first.
On later housing the constraint is the floor. A solid ground floor means moving a sink or a drain is a breaking out and chasing job rather than lifting a couple of boards, and it is much better known before the units are ordered.
We do not sell kitchens. You buy the units wherever the deal is best and we take the room back to sound walls, level floors and services in the right places. Our kitchen work page covers where our part starts and stops.
Four things we commit to on every job, rather than four things we say about ourselves.
Permitted development is not an exemption from Building Regulations. We arrange the West Northamptonshire Council inspections, meet the inspector on site at each stage and see the work through to sign off. We do not make the application itself, and we will tell you what is needed and when.
Free, and you get it before you commit to us. Party walls and skip licences are raised at quotation stage, not three weeks into the dig.
The same people do the groundworks, the brickwork and the fit out. Nobody hands your job to a subcontractor you have never met.
You get a straight answer rather than a padded price. It costs us a job occasionally and saves you a great deal more.
Process, specification and what moves the price are set out on our kitchens page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Northampton street to the next.
New circuits and consumer unit work are notifiable under Part P of the Building Regulations, and gas work must be done by a registered engineer. You should finish holding certificates for both rather than chasing a subcontractor for paperwork two years later.
A kitchen is the room you cannot live without, so the programme matters more than the price. On a narrow terraced frontage the old units come out through the hall and the new ones go in the same way, adding a day at each end unless there is a rear entry.
We tell you honestly how long you will be without a sink, and we will usually rig a temporary one rather than leave you washing up in the bathroom for three weeks.
Part of our wider building work in Northampton.
Send photographs and a rough brief, or call and talk it through. We will tell you if a job is not right for us.
Southfield Construction (Rugby) Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company 14209138.
