Kitchen Renovation Oakwood

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.

In Oakwood, a kitchen renovation typically costs £18,000 to £60,000 or more from design to fitting (indicative London ranges, MyBuilder and Checkatrade, 2026). GS Renovation Ltd, a building contractor based in Potters Bar, does the work in Oakwood: we carry the strip-out, services and fit as one contract, with the electrics certified by a registered electrician.

How the job runs

1. Free design visit at your Oakwood home and an itemised quote.
2. Strip-out and any structural work, first-fix plumbing and electrics, plastering.
3. Units fitted and levelled; stone worktops templated and cut off site.
4. Worktops, appliances, tiling and second fix. Electrics certified under Part P by a registered electrician, or notified to building control. Typically 3 to 5 weeks on site.

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.

Housing in Oakwood

Oakwood has around 3,450 homes on the Council Tax list: 52% post-war, 44% interwar and 3% predate 1919, with 44% flats and 56% houses. The flank wall of a semi in Oakwood gives a kitchen extract and a moved sink the shortest route outside, and 37% of homes here are semi-detached.

Hanging units and planning services in an Oakwood kitchen

The walls of a post-war Oakwood kitchen decide how units are fixed. With 52% of homes built after 1945, the kitchen may have inner walls of lightweight block, or plasterboard stuck to the blockwork on adhesive dabs, which sounds hollow when knocked. Wall cupboards full of crockery and tall larder units put a lot of weight on those fixings. The answer is fixings suited to the backing, or timber or plywood pattresses built into the wall before plastering, so the rails are screwed into something solid. Decide the wall unit positions before the plasterer arrives rather than after.

In an Oakwood flat, check the electricity supply before choosing appliances. With 44% of homes flats, the kitchen may draw on a supply sized when the block was built. An induction hob, a double oven, a dishwasher and a tumble dryer running at once can exceed what that supply was designed for. A registered electrician checks the rating and the consumer unit at survey. Where the supply needs upgrading, the network operator's lead time is built into the programme, because it can hold the whole kitchen up.

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

VOA Council Tax stock of properties, March 2025, for Oakwood Park & Highlands. Counts rounded by the VOA.

For the wider picture around kitchen renovation in Oakwood, see load-bearing wall removal in Oakwood, kitchen renovation across Enfield, kitchen fitting in London, building contractors for London kitchen projects, kitchen renovation anywhere in London and Knock-Through Guide.

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, electrics certified by a registered electrician, 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.

Checked by Abdelaaziz Saaid, founder and director of GS Renovation Ltd (Companies House no. 14611254). Structural design is by the consulting engineer appointed to your project.