What Order Do Kitchen Renovation Trades Work In?

The order is strip out, first fix, close up, second fix, finish, and any trade that arrives before its predecessor has finished will be back to redo something. Most kitchen overruns are sequencing errors rather than slow trades.

The fixed constraints are simple. Nothing gets tiled before the walls are closed. Nothing gets closed before the electrician and plumber have signed off their first fix. Cabinet delivery has to land after the floor is level and before the worktop template.

What happens on day one of a kitchen strip out?

The services are isolated, the appliances disconnected, and the room photographed wall by wall before anything is removed. That photographic record is what settles arguments about existing damage three weeks later.

Floor protection goes down in the route from the front door to the kitchen before the first skip arrives. Plasterboard dust travels further than most homeowners expect, and a dust sheet costs less than a decorator.

Which comes first, plumbing or electrical first fix?

They run together, in that order within each wall. Pipe routes are set first because waste falls are governed by gravity and cannot be negotiated, then cable runs follow the remaining space.

Where a cable must cross a pipe route, the cable goes above and in a separate clip line. Nobody should be drilling near a live route later to hang a cabinet, which is why first fix drawings matter more than they look.

When should the electrician arrive relative to demolition?

After the room is stripped and before anything is closed, and ideally with the cabinet plan in hand. Socket heights, extractor isolation and appliance positions all come from that plan.

Bringing an electrician in after plastering means surface trunking or a second visit to chase walls. Both cost more than the original first fix would have.

Does plastering come before or after first fix?

After first fix, and before second fix. Plaster goes on once the walls contain all their pipework and cabling, because plastering is the last operation that can hide a mistake.

Allow drying time before tiling or cabinet hanging. Fresh plaster releases moisture for days, and cabinets fixed to damp walls trap it against the surface.

When do kitchen cabinets get delivered?

After the floor is finished and level, and before the worktop is templated. Cabinets need a flat, finished floor to sit on; levelling legs cannot compensate for a floor that falls across the room.

Delivery two or three days before installation is ideal. Earlier and the boxes are in the way of every other trade. Later and the fitter stands idle, which is the most expensive kind of waiting.

Should the floor go down before or after cabinets?

Finish the floor wall to wall first. Fitting cabinets on a bare subfloor and tiling around them leaves an unserviceable edge, and any future appliance swap exposes a cut that never matches.

The exception is a floating floor, which should stop at the cabinet line and be finished with a bead. A floating floor pinned under cabinets cannot move, and it will tent at the joints instead.

Where does the worktop template fit in the sequence?

After the base cabinets are fixed, levelled and scribed to the wall, and before the sink and hob are connected. Templating on unlevelled cabinets produces a top that fits the template and not the room.

Stone and sintered tops need five to ten working days between template and install. That gap is the single most common source of a stalled kitchen, because everything downstream waits for it.

When do second fix electrics and plumbing happen?

After the worktop is on and the cabinets are in, before the final decoration. Sockets, switches, taps and wastes all need their final positions to be real before they are connected.

Book the second fix visit at the same time as the first. The same electrician who installed the first fix knows where every cable goes, and a different one will spend an hour finding out.

What is the right point to paint?

Last, after second fix and before the appliances go back. Painting earlier means every subsequent trade marks the wall, and touching in fresh paint never quite disappears.

If the ceiling is being painted, that happens before the cabinets go up. Painting a ceiling above installed cabinets is slower, riskier and always visible from the doorway.

Where do appliances fit in the sequence?

Integrated appliances go in after the cabinets and before the worktop, because they are fixed to the cabinet carcass. Freestanding appliances go in last, after the floor and paint.

Check the appliance dimensions against the cabinet plan before the order is placed, not on delivery day. A 600mm gap that measures 596 is a common and entirely avoidable delay.

How much time does each stage actually take?

Strip out and first fix take three to five days. Plastering and drying take three to five. Cabinet install takes two to four. Template and fabrication take five to ten working days. Second fix, tiling and decoration take four to seven.

Total: six to eight weeks for a straightforward replacement. Compressing that to four usually means someone is working out of order, and the consequence appears later as a callback.

What happens if the worktop is delayed?

Second fix waits, appliances wait, and the fitter either leaves for another job or charges standing time. Neither is unreasonable; both are avoidable with a template date booked before demolition begins.

The mitigation is to have a temporary worktop on standby for a sink and hob, so the household can function while the real one is cut. It costs a few hundred and saves a fortnight of takeaway.

Who coordinates the trades if there is no main contractor?

Whoever holds the schedule, and that has to be one named person rather than a group chat. In a self-managed job the homeowner becomes the coordinator, which means owning the calendar, the deliveries and the inspection bookings.

If that role is unclear on day one, two trades will book the same room for the same week and one of them will leave. The cost of that is never in the quote, because it is not a trade cost at all.

Can the trades overlap to save time?

Some can. Tiling and painting in different rooms can overlap. Plumbing second fix and electrical second fix can share a day if the same person coordinates them.

What cannot overlap is closing a wall before inspection, or templating before levelling. Those are sequence rules, not scheduling preferences, and skipping them moves the delay rather than removing it.

The practical companion to this sequence is the payment schedule, because stage payments should follow these milestones rather than calendar dates. The guide on staging renovation payments sets out how to tie each instalment to a finished stage.