Every kitchen quote I have seen under twenty grand for a full rip-out and rebuild has been missing something. Usually it is the electrician, the plaster patching after the old tiles come off, or the tip fees for the old cabinets. Those three items alone can add four to six thousand to a job in Melbourne, and they show up at the worst possible moment: after the deposit is paid and the room is stripped bare. Cabinetry is the biggest line by a wide margin. For a standard L-shaped kitchen with about eight metres of joinery, expect somewhere between thirty-eight and fifty-five thousand for custom work, or fifteen to twenty-five thousand for flat-pack. Stone benchtops run eight hundred to fourteen hundred per square metre installed, and a typical kitchen needs three to four square metres including the island. Appliances are where people blow the budget. You can spend four thousand on a cooktop and oven combo or twenty-five thousand, and both of them will cook a roast on a Sunday night. The trades stack up quietly. An electrician reworking a kitchen with new circuits, a rangehood and under-cabinet lighting is twenty-five hundred to four thousand. A plumber moving a sink or adding a dishwasher point is twelve hundred to twenty-five hundred. Tiling for a splashback and floor lands between two and five thousand depending on the tile. Then there is the skip bin, the plasterer who has to fix the ceiling after the old rangehood duct comes out, and the painter who has to touch up everything the other trades scuffed. A realistic all-in budget for a mid-range kitchen renovation in Melbourne right now is sixty-five to ninety-five thousand, supplied and installed with mid-tier appliances. If you are doing cabinetry only and keeping the layout, plumbing and appliances, that drops to thirty to forty-five thousand. My advice is to lock in a fixed price on the cabinetry first, then quote every trade separately, so you can see where the money is actually going instead of staring at one big number that hides six smaller ones.

Written by the Dealspot showroom team in Cremorne

Before you buy

Three things worth checking on any piece of furniture

Look at the joinery rather than the finish, ask what the frame is made of, and sit on it for a full five minutes. Dealers who build for the long haul are happy to answer all three.

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