Kitchen renovation in Islington

Islington is almost entirely Victorian and Georgian terraced housing, and the kitchens we replace here were usually added to the back of the house long after it was built. The rear returns are narrow, the party walls are shared on both sides, and the ground floors have often been altered at least once already. That combination shapes every project we take on in the borough: there is rarely a simple like-for-like replacement, because the layout that exists is almost never the layout anyone would choose today. Most of our work here involves opening the kitchen into the rear reception room, which means a structural opening, a steel, and building control sign-off before anything else can proceed.

The party wall position is what most people underestimate here. An Islington terrace is attached on both sides, so a structural opening at the rear usually means notice to two neighbours rather than one, and each has the same statutory period to respond. Two months for work to a party wall, one month for excavation. Served at the right time those run alongside the design work and cost nothing; served late they are simply added to the end of the programme, which is why we raise them at the first visit rather than the week before we mobilise.

The other Islington-specific issue is what the ground floor has already been through. Many of these houses were converted to flats and back again, or had a previous opening formed without calculations, and it is common to find a beam that was never sized properly holding up the floor above. We open up and check before pricing the steel rather than after, because discovering it mid-build turns a scheduled week into an unscheduled month.