Seven stages, and you are never the project manager.

Some people arrive with a folder of saved images and a fixed idea. Others arrive with a kitchen they have simply stopped liking and no vocabulary for why. Both are fine starting points, and the first meeting treats them the same way: we talk about who uses the room and when, what currently annoys you about it, and what would have to change for you to stop thinking about it.

It can happen at your house or at the showroom. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing — and by the end of it you will have an honest early view on whether what you have in mind is possible in that space, and roughly what kind of project it is.

This is where the room is measured properly and drawn to scale: dimensions and squareness, ceiling height, window and door swings, where the services currently run and where they could go, and what the floor and the structure will take. The design and costings stage runs from £250 to £500 depending on the scope of the project, with £60 added if a site visit is required.

We publish that figure because the alternative — a free design paid for invisibly inside the price of the units — is how people end up unable to compare two quotations. You are buying a measured drawing, the 3D imaging and a costed specification, and you know exactly what it costs before you say yes.

Our in-house CAD imaging system produces a computer representation of your concept — not a photograph of somebody else’s kitchen, but yours: your window, your ceiling height, your worktop run. Layout options are drawn to scale, and door style, worktop, handles and lighting are dropped in and viewed from the angles you will actually stand at.

The point is not the picture. The point is that the decisions get made while they are still free to change. An island that eats the walkway, a full-height run that darkens the corner, a handle that fights the door style: all obvious in a render, all expensive to discover with the floor already down.

The second consultation happens in the showroom, where you can put a hand on the finishes while looking at the 3D images of your own room. Everything is listed: cabinetry, worktop, appliances, the scope of the building work and the programme for it, and you leave with a written quotation and invoice rather than a number somebody said out loud.

This is also the moment to mention the Harpenden Rugby Football Club offer if it applies to you — members get £150 off a cabinetry order, and we donate a further £150 to the club. It is not applied automatically, so it is worth saying.

Once the order goes in, the cabinetry is sourced and manufactured to your drawing, which takes a minimum of six to eight weeks to delivery. Appliances, stone and any made-to-order items have their own lead times, and they are checked against that programme rather than assumed.

This is the least dramatic stage and the one that decides whether a project runs on time. Kitchens that overrun have almost always overrun at the ordering desk rather than on site — which is why the start date is set after the lead times are confirmed, not before.

Any structural work, the first fix, the plastering and the flooring happen in sequence, then the cabinetry goes in, then worktops are templated and fitted, then the second fix, the splashbacks, the electrics and the decoration. It is our own team of local tradesmen, the same faces job after job, working to the drawing you signed off.

We are a family firm that has renovated several houses while living in them, so we know what it is to make a cup of tea in a room with no worktop. The programme is sequenced around the household where it can be, and keeping the disruption to a minimum is a stated aim rather than a hope.

Everything is run and checked, the room is cleaned, and you are shown how it all works, including the things people otherwise discover by accident — which isolator does what, how the soft-close hinges adjust, what the worktop wants in its first fortnight. The care guide on this site covers the rest.

Then the part clients tend to write about: you ring the person who designed the room. One reviewer describes the whole thing being project-managed to the point where all they had to do was describe the vision. That only works if the same person is still there at the end, which in a two-man family firm they are.