Kitchen Fitting in Bognor Regis

In a bungalow, the wall you want gone is holding the roof up

Most kitchen enquiries here do not start as kitchen jobs. They start as a sixties bungalow with a narrow galley kitchen, a dining room behind it, and a rear wall between the two of them and the garden. Take that wall out and the back of the house becomes one room.

The catch is that a single-storey house has no floor above to share its loads out. The wall you want removed may be carrying rafters, a purlin or the ceiling structure directly, so the beam is designed for what is genuinely bearing on it, propping goes in before anything is cut, and padstones are sized rather than guessed. Engineer, then calculations, then a price. A structural opening on its own is removing a wall and installing a beam.

Want to know whether your back wall can go? Request a quote or ring 07470 078236. One point of contact, reply within a working day.

The floor decides the kitchen before the doors do

At 29 Victoria Road the ground floor is tiled from end to end over underfloor heating, with high-end LED lighting above. That build-up governs more of the kitchen than any handle choice.

A screed has to dry. The heating is then brought up in stages and commissioned, and only after that does anything get bonded down — tile it early and the grout cracks in the first heating season. Once tiled, the finished floor level is fixed for good, so plinth heights, appliance apertures and door undercuts are all set from it rather than from a bare slab somebody measured months earlier. That job is in progress rather than complete: the Victoria Road extension.

Kitchens for people who intend to stay

A good proportion of our kitchen clients here are retired and moved into a bungalow on purpose. That changes the brief.

• Drawers rather than base cupboards, so nothing lives on the floor at the back of a carcass.
• Controls at the front of the hob, not behind the pans.
• Sockets above the worktop, reachable without moving an appliance.
• Task lighting under every wall unit — ceiling light alone gets harder to work under as eyes age.

None of it adds much at the design stage and every item is awkward to add later.

What brings Arun into a kitchen, and what does not

New units in an existing room are nobody's business but yours. What brings the council in is structure and services — a loadbearing wall going, a new opening in an external wall, drainage altered. Building control here is Arun's own in-house team: a deposit acknowledged inside three working days, most full plans appraised within three weeks. On anything with a beam we go the full plans route, because an agreed drawing beats an argument beside a prop.

Inside one of the three conservation areas the internal kitchen is still your own affair; what needs looking at is anything changing the outside, such as widening an opening or cladding a wall. The wider building side is building works and renovations in Bognor Regis.

Two things we check on the first visit

Floor level. Bungalows here often sit on a solid slab that has moved a little over sixty years. A run of units shows up 15mm of fall across a room, and a worktop will not sit on it.

Where the waste goes. Moving a sink is a drainage decision before a plumbing one: it needs continuous fall to the drain.

Units, appliances, building work and structure are priced separately, so you see what each costs. We will supply the kitchen or fit one you have already bought — either way the labour is costed the same. The trade generally is under kitchen fitting.

All workmanship guaranteed for 24 months from completion. Manufacturer warranties on all materials and installed products passed to you in full — many run to 10 years or more. Structural work is signed off by Building Control and covered by our £2m public liability insurance. We're working towards an insurance-backed guarantee scheme and will offer it as soon as we're eligible.

Email the supplier's plan across and every part of it gets a price, structure included. Rated 5 stars on Yell, 200-plus projects behind us, £2m public liability and employers' liability.