All articles · 6 min read

Can I order a kitchen from the estate agent's floor plan?

No — use it to plan, but always measure the room yourself before you order. A listing's floor plan usually has no scale and no one standing behind the numbers, and a kitchen ordered 5 cm wrong can't be fixed afterwards.

Why a kitchen is especially sensitive to wrong measurements

A kitchen isn't one piece of furniture — it's a row of modules in fixed widths that have to add up to the wall's length. That's why a measuring error bites harder in a kitchen than almost anywhere else in the home.

Here's the sum. You plan a kitchen wall from the listing, which shows 3.60 m. You put together: 60 cm dishwasher + 80 cm sink + 60 cm hob + 60 cm cabinet + 60 cm cabinet + 40 cm tall unit = 360 cm. Perfect on paper.

You measure it yourself and find 3.54 m. Those 6 cm don't exist as a module, and you can't shave 1 cm off every cabinet. The fix is either to swap the 40 cm tall unit for a 30 cm one and live with a 4 cm filler strip, or to move a wall. If the error runs the other way — the wall is 3.66 m — you get a 6 cm gap against the wall that has to be hidden with an infill panel, and it shows.

The same goes for depth. A standard base cabinet is 60 cm deep, the worktop typically 62-64 cm. If the room is 8 cm narrower than the drawing says, those 8 cm disappear from the walkway in front of the kitchen — and as a rule of thumb you need 90-120 cm of clear walkway in front of a kitchen run for two people to move at once, and at least 120 cm between two facing runs so doors and the dishwasher can open.

How to measure a kitchen wall properly

Measuring a kitchen isn't one measurement. Do this for every wall the kitchen will run along:

1. Measure the wall's length at three heights: at the floor, at worktop height (about 90 cm) and at wall-cabinet height (about 150 cm). If the three figures don't match, the wall isn't plumb — and always use the smallest figure as your working length.
2. Check the corner. Use a square, or measure the diagonals: if the room is square, the diagonals are equal. If they're not, plan for an infill at the corner.
3. Measure the floor's level. Lay a spirit level or a long straight batten on the floor along the wall. If the floor drops 1.5 cm over 3 metres, the cabinets need adjusting and the plinth height changes.
4. Measure and note everything that breaks the wall: the window's width, height and distance to the corner; the door's width and swing; the radiator's position; drain and water connections; sockets; the ventilation duct's location.
5. Measure the ceiling height in several places if wall cabinets are to run all the way up.

Write the figures down in millimetres, not "about three and a half metres". The kitchen company's configurator works in millimetres, and that's exactly where the errors creep in if you round off.

What the listing's floor plan is actually good for

The listing's floor plan isn't useless — it's just a different tool. As a rule it's correct about which rooms exist and how they sit relative to each other, and that's exactly what you need for planning:

• Which wall the kitchen should run along, and whether there's enough light from the windows
• Whether there's room for an island at all, or whether it'll be a peninsula
• How close the kitchen sits to the drain and soil stack — moving a drain is one of the most expensive changes in a kitchen project
• How the flow between hallway, kitchen and dining area will work

So use the listing plan to make the decisions, and your own measurements to order. They're two different decisions, and they shouldn't rest on the same piece of paper.

Getting a measured kitchen plan without paying a draughtsman

You don't need an architect to get a measured starting point for the kitchen company. There are three routes:

• Laser measure and graph paper. A laser measure is the cheapest tool in the whole kitchen project, and a kitchen room can be measured up in half an hour if you measure each wall at three heights and note window, door, drain and radiator as you go.
• Scan the room. If you have an iPhone or iPad with a LiDAR scanner — it sits in the Pro models — you can scan the kitchen and get the room's shape and measurements directly. In HouseSense you get the plan, the area per room, and a takeoff of wall and floor surfaces you can hand on.
• Draw the room on screen from your own measurements. Without LiDAR, you can draw the room with your finger and type in the measured figures — the plan is just as accurate, because it's the measurements that carry it, not the scanner.

Bring the screenshot or PDF to the kitchen dealer along with your notes on window, door, drain and radiator. The dealer uses it to draw up a proposal, and you have a basis to check that proposal against.

The kitchen company's own survey — when does it happen?

Most kitchen suppliers send a surveyor out before production begins. That's good, but it's not an excuse to skip your own measuring, for two reasons:

1. The price is agreed before the survey. The quote you sign is calculated from the figures you or the salesperson provided. If the survey turns up something different, the number of modules changes — and so does the price.
2. The layout is decided before the survey. The choice of island or no island, whether the sink sits under the window, and whether there's room for a dishwasher beside it, gets made on the basis you bring in.

Also bear in mind that the supplier's survey usually covers the kitchen, not the building. If a wall needs removing to open the kitchen onto the living room, that isn't part of it — and neither the kitchen company, an app, nor a floor plan can tell you whether that wall is load-bearing. That needs a building surveyor or a structural engineer who can look at the actual construction.

A short checklist before you sign

• Have I measured every wall at three heights and used the smallest figure?
• Does the sum of the module widths match the wall length, minus at least 2-3 cm for infill?
• Is there 90-120 cm of clear walkway in front of the kitchen run — and 120 cm between two runs?
• Can the dishwasher and oven doors open without hitting a corner or a tall unit?
• Has the windowsill height been checked against the worktop height, where the kitchen runs past a window?
• Are the drain, water connection and electrics marked in — and do they match the new layout?

Tick all six, and you're in a far better position than the person who ordered from a listing floor plan — however tidy it looked.