The original Oakwood kitchen is a narrow room at the back with a larder in one corner and a garden door in the wrong place. GS Renovation rebuilds them properly across N14, taking in the old lean to where there is one, moving the drainage where it needs to move, and fitting the whole room with a single team.
The back kitchen, the larder and the lean to
Most of these houses were handed over with a small kitchen, a walk in larder with a cold shelf, and a thin outside store or WC tacked onto the back. Absorbing that lean to is the cheapest extra floor area available in the house, but it is rarely a matter of knocking two rooms together, because the lean to usually sits on a shallow footing of its own with a single skin wall and a roof that was never insulated to any standard. In practice we rebuild it rather than adapt it.
The larder deserves a thought before it disappears. The cold shelf and the airbrick behind it are the reason it stays cool, so where a client wants a working pantry we keep the vent and lose the shelf. Where it becomes cabinetry instead, the recess is often almost exactly the right depth for a run of full height storage, and that makes it one of the very few places where a 1930s room hands you an alcove suiting a modern kitchen without asking for a compromise in return.
Drains, gullies and building over in N14
Moving the sink is the part that costs. These houses take waste out through the back wall to an open gully with the soil stack outside, so a layout that puts the sink on the other side of the room means new below ground drainage rather than a longer pipe. Falls have to be right, roughly one in forty for a small waste run. Too flat and solids sit in the pipe; too steep and the water simply runs away and leaves them behind instead.
Where a kitchen extension crosses a drain that became a public sewer after the 2011 transfer, and plenty of shared runs in Oakwood did, Thames Water needs a build over agreement before you cover it. We apply for that early. Extraction is the other thing worth doing once and properly: a hood ducted through the cavity wall to an external terminal, at the largest diameter the unit takes, with a sleeve through the cavity so you are not pushing moist air into the wall itself.
- Open-plan kitchen-diner conversions with steel support
- Handleless, shaker and in-frame door styles fitted
- Wall removal between the kitchen and dining room
- Tiling, flooring and feature lighting
- Old kitchen strip-out, disposal and making good
Why Oakwood Homeowners Choose GS Renovation
We deliver the kitchen and everything it depends on: the structural opening if there is one, the drainage under the floor, the ducting through the wall, the certified electrics and the units themselves. No gap between a fitter and a builder, no argument about whose job the waste run is, and a room in an N14 house that works as well behind the doors as in front of them.
- Old kitchen stripped, disposed of and made good within the price
- Itemised pricing, so you can see what every stage costs
- A dedicated project manager from first survey to handover
- Appliance and extraction routes agreed at design stage
- Waste cleared as we go, not left piled in the garden
- Photographs kept at each stage for your records