When in your home build can you start thinking about kitchens, bathrooms and electrics
You likely have electrics going to your island, which needs to be underground.
— Laura, Mayo
Hi Laura
Thanks for your question. Building a new home is not for the faint-hearted or the ill-prepared. It will certainly make some demands on your time, no matter how good a team you have, so how do you best prepare and what does success look like? Let's see.
In your case, I’m thinking you have had months, possibly years, to prepare for the start of your house build. You may have looked at magazines or more likely online. Trawling through all the latest trends and moodboards. The design phase itself often moves at a glacial pace. Your architect will show you various options, and you have time to consider each (hopefully in light of the costs) before making your next step. But once a project gets to site, it all changes. Now you have builder’s overheads to think of, and the pace changes dramatically. Now it's all early mornings and late evenings on site, so how does it really work behind the scenes and here are the priorities?
When a builder starts on site, we all know that the first thing he needs to do is dig out the foundations. The foundations start with the concrete footings underneath all your blockwork walls, and they finish with the pouring of your ground floor slab. In this process, your site transforms from a field to a finished slab of concrete, so there is a massive transformation. Typically, this takes about four to six weeks, depending on the weather and how organised your builder is. The significance of the foundations is that when the ground floor slab is poured, it needs to contain all your underground plumbing, heating, sewers and any electrical points. So let's see what this means for you.
Starting with your kitchen, you have the sink and dishwasher to consider from a plumbing point of view. You likely have electrics going to your island, which needs to be underground. Nowadays, many extractors are underground, so this needs to be considered. If you are considering an American fridge, it needs an underground water source. Next, let's look at your utility room. Here you may have your washing machine. Perhaps you need a floor gully for mopping out this area. So you can see that the kitchen and utility designs are needed quite early in the building process. They don’t need to be 100% signed off, but they need to be broadly in the zone. It may be that your new heating source will be sited in the utility room too.
The next key area in bathrooms. I always tell clients to shop around for bathroom ware as soon as they get planning permission. They don’t need to purchase anything, but it's good to get an idea of what they like. Equally important is the layout of any ground floor WC’s. I find that when architects design the WC’s in a house initially, it is often a ‘placeholder’ design. Enough thought to get these rooms working at a basic level, but if considered further by an interior designer, things will often change. My recommendation here is to study these rooms in detail. If you don't plan on using an interior designer, you can often get great advice from reputable bathroom ware retailers who are used to looking at house plans and making recommendations on bathroom ware layouts and choices. In bathrooms, you have the added complication of a 100mm sewer pipe, which gets connected to your toilet. This can’t be moved later, so the location of the toilet and ideally the sink, bath and shower need to be pinned down with accuracy. No one wants to see ugly pipes emanating from your beautifully tiled new walls.
Now that we have the foundation information mapped out, let's have a look at windows. This is a slightly more nuanced question; it really depends on your window budget. What I mean by this is that a modest budget may lead you to consider PVC windows. There are some window companies now that will deliver these windows in three weeks from order. If, however, you have a more generous budget, you may consider aluminium or indeed aluclad. These windows can take 2-3 months to arrive, often from Northern Europe. Depending on your builder, this can mean that this information needs to be agreed upon earlier than you expect. We have clients consider different window companies once we get planning permission, so that we can order the windows as soon as the blockwork starts. This requires a high degree of accuracy in the blockwork and a very diligent and accurate foreman, but it saves you months in your building program.
The electrics are a later event. I feel you can look at electrical drawings all day long, but nothing beats walking around the house with the electrician once the blockwork is complete, the roof is on, and all the internal walls are up, so you have much more breathing space. Then you can picture the furniture in your new rooms and locate the lighting and sockets accordingly. Your kitchen design will help in the kitchen and utility.
So, to summarise, it's an initial push to get your kitchen and bathroom designs in place before the foundations are complete, but this guarantees you have left nothing out before the concrete slab is poured. Nothing that is, except for floor sockets.
Kieran McCarthy is a building engineer and director of KMC Homes bespoke A-rated new home builder, serving Cork and Limerick.
He is also a co-presenter of the RTÉ property show Cheap Irish Homes. Check out KMC Homes’ brand new website kmchomes.ie Follow Kieran on Instagram @kierankmc for more home building information, tips and Q&A advice.
You can also follow Kieran on the Built Around You Youtube channel and @kierankmc on TikTok
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