The only village where you can start at our showroom
Our unit and showroom are at Middleton Business Park, on Yapton Road, inside the parish. For a Middleton-on-Sea kitchen that means you can begin with samples and a table to spread a plan on, five minutes from home, rather than with a salesman at your door. The showroom is open by appointment so that somebody is actually there; ring first and James will meet you.
Once the kitchen is chosen, being local also helps on site. Small deliveries can come straight from our unit, a forgotten fixing is a short drive rather than a lost afternoon, and the person who measured the room is the person who checks the fitting.
Three kinds of Middleton kitchen
Middleton's housing falls into three groups, and the kitchen job differs between them.
- Interwar estate houses on Sea Lane, Sea Way, Old Point, The Byway and around Southdean and Elmer Beach, built between 1920 and 1940. Often timber-framed, often with small original kitchens off a hall. The usual brief is moving the kitchen into a larger room or joining it to the dining room.
- Post-war bungalows behind the front. Galley kitchens, a dining room alongside, and a wall that the owner would like gone.
- Flats. Nearly 18 per cent of Middleton homes are purpose-built flats. A flat kitchen is a compact job governed by a lease.
In a flat, the lease comes first
Moving a sink, a washing machine or an extract in a flat usually needs the freeholder's or managing agent's consent, because waste pipes join a shared stack and the floor is someone else's ceiling. Many leases also set working hours and require floor coverings with sound insulation. We read the lease clauses with you and prepare a short method statement for the managing agent before anything is ordered.
In a timber-framed house, find the frame
A lot of Middleton's 1920s and 30s houses are timber-framed and weather-boarded. Taking out an internal wall in one of those is a different calculation from taking one out of a brick house: the wall may be part of the frame that keeps the building square. An engineer looks at it, and the opening is designed before it is formed. The same goes for a new window over the sink in an external wall: in a framed house it is a header and two posts, not a lintel in brickwork.
Water: hard, and specified for
Middleton is on Portsmouth Water, supplied from the chalk, at between 267 and 315 milligrams per litre across the company's zones: hard to very hard. That is enough to fur a boiling-water tap or a dishwasher in short order. We fit taps with replaceable cartridges, boiling-water taps with filters you can reach, and, if you want a softener, a separate unsoftened drinking supply, which Portsmouth Water recommends.
Kitchens for the people who live here
Middleton has one of the older populations on this coast: four in ten residents were 65 or over at the 2021 census, and 309 were 85 or over. A kitchen for a long stay is planned differently: drawers rather than cupboards, an eye-level oven, wall units set lower, a hob with controls at the front, good lighting under the wall units, and a floor with no threshold between the kitchen and the next room.
Kitchens in an extension
Where the kitchen goes into a new extension, the drainage is the thing to settle first. Middleton sits on brickearth and alluvium with groundwater close to the surface in winter, and Building Control now expects soakaway tests to reflect that. A kitchen extension in the village is planned with the rainwater and the waste routes agreed before the walls go up. More on that under house extensions in Middleton-on-Sea.
What it costs
The bands on our price guide include VAT. A like-for-like refit is from £6,000 to £22,800. A full refit with new services and flooring is £13,200 to £36,000. A refit with a knock-through is £22,800 to £50,400. We supply kitchens or fit yours, and the labour is priced the same.
The trade is under kitchen fitting; see also kitchens in Felpham next door and kitchens in Bognor Regis. The showroom is described on our office and showroom, and the village on builders in Middleton-on-Sea.
Ring to book a time at the showroom, or send us the plan, and every part of the kitchen comes back on its own line, structure included. Ring 07470 078236. Two-year workmanship guarantee and £2m public liability.