The Points You Fix Before the Plaster

The most expensive kitchen mistakes are not made in a showroom. They are made months earlier, on a services drawing, by a contractor who put the point where the point usually goes. Once the plaster is on and the tiles are up, every one of them becomes a compromise, a trunking channel or a chase cut through a new wall.

Bring the kitchen planner in before the civil work finishes. If that is not possible, settle this list yourself.

Electrical

• A circuit per heavy appliance. An oven, a hob and a dishwasher each want their own dedicated line — a powerful induction hob in particular, which draws more than most Indian kitchen circuits were sized for.
• Points behind the cabinet, not behind the appliance. A socket directly behind a built-in oven is unreachable once the oven is in. Plan them in the adjacent cabinet.
• Worktop points at the right height, clear of the splashback line and clear of where the hob and sink cut-outs will fall.
• Low-voltage runs for lighting — under-cabinet, in-cabinet, and the Gola channel if the fronts are handleless. These are drivers and cables, and they need a home.
• A point at the island, fed through the floor slab, if there is any chance of an island. Retrofitting one means breaking the floor.

Plumbing and drainage

• Supply and waste for the main sink — and for the second sink in the utility, which is forgotten more often than you would believe.
• A dishwasher inlet and outlet beside the sink cabinet, whether or not a dishwasher is being bought now. It costs nothing at this stage and everything later.
• Island drainage, which must fall across the slab and therefore must be decided before the floor is levelled. This is the single point of no return in kitchen planning.
• A softener or filter location, because hard water shortens the life of everything downstream.

Ventilation and gas

Ducting is the constraint nobody plans for. The route from hood to external wall has to exist, run as straight and short as the building allows, and be sized for the hood you actually want — a ceiling hood over an island imposes a route through the slab or a dropped ceiling, and it must be agreed before the ceiling closes. Gas points and the cylinder or pipeline entry belong on the same drawing.

One drawing, once

Every item here is trivial to draw and expensive to move. The point of a factory-built German kitchen is that it arrives to the millimetre — which only helps if the building was ready to the millimetre too.

Bring the floor plan, and the architect if you can, to a showroom. A planner will mark the services onto it in one sitting, months before anything is ordered — and long before anybody needs to talk about price.