Kitchen and Bathroom Fitters in Caterham (CR3)
A kitchen in a Caterham period house is rarely just a kitchen. The rear of a Victorian or Edwardian property was built as several small rooms, and getting the space people actually want usually means taking a wall out and putting the services right behind it.
Opening up the back of an older Caterham house
The standard layout on the older hill streets is a narrow kitchen in the rear addition with a separate dining room beside it, divided by a wall that is often doing structural work.
Combining the two is the single change that makes the most difference to how these houses live, and it is a building job before it is a kitchen job — a beam sized properly, the opening formed and made good, floors levelled across what used to be two rooms with different build-ups. Fit a kitchen into that space without dealing with the structure first and you get a good-looking room with a step in the middle of it.
What is behind the walls in a house of that age
In houses of this period the services are usually the surprise. Wiring that has been added to over decades, waste runs that were never meant to take a modern kitchen, and pipework buried where nobody expects it. We open up, look properly and tell you what we find before the units are ordered, because the point at which you want to know about a rewire or a new waste run is before the plaster goes back on, not after. The same is true of bathrooms in these houses, where a floor that has taken a hundred years of settlement often needs levelling before anything is tiled.
One trade after another, in the right order
A kitchen or bathroom is half a dozen trades in sequence, and most of what goes wrong is sequencing rather than workmanship.
Our own team does the building work and we bring in and manage the specialists, so the electrician is there when the walls are open and the tiler is not waiting on a plasterer who has gone to another site.
More in Caterham
Everything we do in Caterham is on the Caterham area sheet, and the full detail of how we approach this trade is on the bathrooms & kitchens page.
Common questions
Q.01Do you supply the kitchen or do I?
Either. Plenty of Caterham customers buy their own units and have us do everything else; others would rather we handled supply and fit as one job. We will price it whichever way suits you, and say plainly what is included.
Q.02Can you take the wall out between the kitchen and dining room?
Usually, but it needs the beam sized and the opening formed properly, and on most Caterham period houses that wall is carrying load. We survey it first and price the structural work as its own item rather than burying it.
Q.03Do you do bathrooms as well?
Yes — the same team and the same approach. In older Caterham houses the floor is often the first thing to sort out, because tiling onto a floor that has settled over a century is how you get cracked grout a year later.
Q.04Will I be without a kitchen for weeks?
For part of it, unavoidably. We give you the programme with the price so you know which weeks those are and can plan around them, rather than finding out as it goes.
Q.05Do you fit wet rooms?
Yes. In an older Caterham house the floor is the deciding factor — a wet room needs it formed to fall and tanked properly before any tiling, and on a period floor that has settled that is most of the job. We survey it and price the floor work separately from the fit.
Thinking about bathrooms & kitchens in Caterham?
Tell us what you are planning. We come out, look at the job properly and give you a price for it.