Farnham’s older houses have lovely bones. But the kitchen? That can be a different story. Walls that wander, floors that slope, and pipework, waste, gas and electrics added decades apart by different hands who each had their own ideas. It’s part of the character — and it changes how we plan the work.
Because here’s the thing: in a house like that, picking cabinets and a worktop is the easy bit. Working out what the room is actually doing underneath is what decides whether the job goes smoothly.
Older walls need a fitter’s eye
A Georgian, Victorian or Edwardian kitchen may look square until we put a tape measure across it. Then the wall leans a little, another bows, and the corner you assumed was a neat right angle turns out to be somewhere in the nineties. We’ve seen it in pretty much every period house we’ve fitted.
That matters when fitting modern cabinets and worktops. A run of units needs to sit level, but push it hard against a wandering wall and you get gaps that look like nothing anybody planned. This is where scribe fillers and careful hand-cut work earn their keep: we shape the finish to the room rather than pretending the room is straight. It’s the difference between a kitchen that looks like it grew there and one that looks like it was dropped in from a warehouse.
The same care applies to worktops, splashbacks and the edges around windows or chimney breasts. A few millimetres can be the difference between a tidy, considered finish and a gap that catches your eye every time you walk in.
Floors, walls and the things behind them
Older properties often have solid masonry walls, which can make running new pipework more involved than in a newer home with accessible service voids. Chasing pipes into a solid wall is slower and dustier, and we need to think carefully about where services should go before the plastering and cabinets cover everything up.
Floors bring their own surprises too. The kitchen can sit a step lower than the hall, or higher than the dining room, or have settled over a century or two into its own idea of level. Lift a floorboard to get at a pipe and you often find two or three floor layers from different renovations underneath, each one nudging the finished height of the cabinets, the appliances, the thresholds. In an old house, “what level will the finished floor be?” is a genuinely open question until we’ve looked.
And behind the old units? That’s where the archaeology is. Pipework that’s mismatched, oddly sized, soldered by somebody having a bad decade, or simply at the end of its life. Some older properties still have lead water pipes. The Drinking Water Inspectorate explains how to identify and deal with lead pipework — and if we find it, we’ll talk you through the right next step before it disappears behind new cabinets for another twenty years.
Moving the sink can mean lifting the floor
On a kitchen plan, moving the sink by a metre looks like nothing. In an older house, that same metre can mean lifting floorboards across half the ground floor, rerouting the supplies, and finding a waste route with the right fall back to the drain. It’s simply messier than a new-build kitchen, where the service routes were plotted sensibly before the walls went up. We’d rather tell you that on day one than let you discover it when the old units are out and the floorboards are up.
There can also be things we can’t confirm until we actually trace the route: a shared drain with the neighbour, old clay pipes, or a connection somebody altered at some point for reasons nobody wrote down. Doesn’t mean every older kitchen hides a drainage problem. It means we check what’s there instead of designing a layout around a guess. Guesses have a habit of getting expensive halfway through.
Electrics deserve attention too
A kitchen uses plenty of power. Modern appliances, sockets, lighting and an induction hob can place different demands on wiring that may have been installed or adapted over several decades.
Sometimes the existing electrics are suitable; sometimes the kitchen work brings a need for new circuits, consumer-unit work or a wider electrical check. We’ll talk this through with you and involve the appropriate qualified electrician where needed. It’s much better to understand the options before the new cabinets are fitted than to find a cable route is blocked once everything is in place.
If the house is listed, remember that “period” and “listed” are not the same thing. But where a property is listed, changes to historic features or significant walls may need extra care and approval. Waverley Borough Council’s listed-building guidance is a useful place to check what may apply to your home.
How we approach the survey and design
We start by looking closely at the room, not just taking one measurement and reaching for a catalogue. We measure walls in several places, check floor levels, note openings and chimney breasts, and trace visible services. Three measurements along a wall can tell us a lot about whether it’s straight enough for a standard cabinet run.
Then we look at the layout with you. Can the sink and cooker stay near their current positions? Is there a practical route for any new plumbing? Which features make the room feel like your house?
Where it makes sense, designing around existing services can save disruption and cost. But the layout still needs to work for how you cook, store things and spend time together. There’s no point preserving every old pipe position if it leaves you with a kitchen that doesn’t suit daily life.
We also like to keep the character that makes an older room special. Shaker-style cabinets, considered paint colours, an original pantry or a fireplace may all have a place in the finished design. The aim is not to make a Georgian or Victorian house feel like a showroom dropped in from somewhere else; it’s to make the kitchen work beautifully for modern life while still feeling at home.
For examples of our kitchen work and an outline of what we can help with, see our kitchen fitting service.
What should you budget?
Honest answer: a period-property kitchen usually costs more than the same brief in a modern flat, because there’s more preparation, more service alterations and more making good. As a broad UK guide, Checkatrade’s October 2026 figures put a budget kitchen renovation at around £6,200–£16,800, with bespoke renovations around £15,000–£50,000. Those are national ranges, not Farnham prices.
For an older house, a fair starting point is roughly £10,000–£30,000 for a complete, mid-range kitchen project — with the caveat that specification and whatever’s hiding behind the walls can move that figure either way. A proper rewire, drainage repairs, structural changes or bespoke cabinetry can take it beyond. This isn’t a quote; every house and every brief is different. But we’d rather you walk in knowing the ballpark than find out the hard way.
Whatever fitter you use, ask for a clear breakdown of what’s included: units, fitting, plumbing, electrical work, flooring, tiling, plastering, waste removal and decorating can all be separate parts of the job, and a quote that doesn’t say is a quote that grows. And leave some room for surprises behind the walls. In a house that’s been standing for 150 years, they do turn up.
Planning a spring kitchen? Start while it’s winter
Winter is a good time to plan. The survey, the layout conversations, the costing — it all happens indoors, out of the weather, so a spring start is realistic once the details are agreed. And if the messy floorboard-up stage happens in spring, at least you’re not living around it in the middle of a cold snap.
But if the work itself happens in winter, there’s no pretending the kitchen stays usable. You’ll be running on a kettle, a microwave and a washing-up bowl in the bath for a spell. We say that plainly, because it’s part of the deal and you deserve to hear it before you sign anything, not after.
We work across Aldershot, Farnborough, Farnham, Guildford and surrounding areas, and we’ve fitted plenty of kitchens in houses with more history than most museums. If you’re thinking about yours, book a visit at a time that works for you and we’ll take a proper look at the room, the services and everything else that’ll shape the finished job.