Kitchen Refresh, Replace or Re-plan: Choosing Your Scope

• Refresh: new doors and drawer fronts, handles, perhaps a benchtop and splashback. Carcasses, plumbing, gas and power stay exactly where they are.
• Replace in place: the old kitchen comes out completely and a new one goes in with the sink, cooktop and appliances in the same positions.
• Re-plan: the layout changes. Something that carries water, waste, gas or load moves, or a wall comes out.

The jump from the second to the third catches people out. Keeping the existing plumbing and electrical positions saves $2,000 to $10,000 on its own, based on the figures in our kitchen cost guide. On larger kitchens, removing walls or relocating plumbing adds $5,000 to $20,000 once consent costs are counted. None of that money buys a nicer cabinet. It pays for pipes, framing and paperwork you'll never see.

So work out which scope you're in before you look at a single benchtop sample. It changes which samples are even worth looking at.

A refresh is the cheapest scope, which is exactly why it gets picked for kitchens it can't help.

The three conditions a refresh needs

Replacing doors and fronts only makes sense when three things are all true. The carcasses are structurally sound, the layout already works, and the look is the only thing letting the kitchen down. Miss one and you're spending money to delay a job you'll do anyway.

Brick-and-tile homes through Manurewa, Pakuranga and Henderson, and early-2000s builds in Flat Bush and Albany, often have standard-sized melamine cabinetry on solid carcasses. The boxes are fine and the doors just look their age, so new fronts, handles and a fresh splashback can make one of those kitchens read ten years younger.

Replacement doors run roughly $60 to $200 each depending on size, material and finish, and a straightforward door swap is usually one to two days' work. For labour, hardware and door-style costs, see what new cupboard doors and fronts cost on their own.

The pull-a-door test

Before you price anything, take a door off and look behind it. Check the carcass edges and the back panel. Swollen chipboard, soft spots near the sink, or hinges that won't hold a screw mean the boxes have had it, and that's a replacement job, not a door job.

Some faults look worse than they are. Doors that don't sit flush are almost always hinge adjustment, since European concealed hinges adjust in and out, up and down, and side to side. Doors that slam can usually take a clip-on soft-close damper. Our cupboard door guide boils it down to one rule. Faults in the hardware are worth repairing. Faults in the board are not.

What a refresh can't fix

If the fridge door hits a drawer, there's no bench beside the hob, or the corner cupboard is a black hole, new doors won't touch it. A refresh fixes how a kitchen looks. It does nothing for how it works. The same applies to the Grey Lynn and Mt Eden villas where the original kitchen was squeezed into a back room. In those houses the real gain is usually in opening the space up, which puts you in a different scope altogether.

This is the scope the $26,000 to $35,000 mid-range band describes best. Everything comes out: carcasses, benchtop, splashback, flooring, appliances. A new kitchen goes back in with the working points where they already were.

What stays where, and why that matters

The sink stays on its wall. The cooktop stays over its gas line or circuit. The dishwasher goes back beside the sink. Because nothing that carries water, waste or gas has moved, a kitchen remodelled within its existing space is unlikely to need a building consent at all, which is the position MBIE and Auckland Council both take in their guidance. You still need licensed people for the parts the law reserves: an authorised plumber to disconnect and reconnect the sink, and a licensed gasfitter for a gas hob. A like-for-like hob swap on the same gas and the same pipe is treated as low-risk gasfitting, the simplest gas job a kitchen can have.

A same-footprint kitchen in Milford

Our Milford renovation on the North Shore is a good example of how far this scope can go. The old kitchen had a cream finish, a blue laminate benchtop and leadlight cabinet doors. We fitted handleless gloss-white cabinetry with a shadowline finish, a light engineered stone benchtop, a glass splashback and an induction cooktop, with a full-height bank of storage for the pantry. Nothing structural moved. The money went into what you see and use, not into relocating services.

Where the money goes in a replacement

With the layout fixed, the spend is mostly cabinetry, benchtop and appliances. Cabinetry is the single biggest line in a kitchen. Ours is made by Little Giant Interiors, our group's cabinetry brand, in its own Rosedale factory, so the specification conversation happens with the people building it. If you're weighing flat-pack against made-to-measure, Little Giant Interiors' comparison of modular and custom kitchens sets out the trade-offs. To see how a same-footprint replacement compares with a re-plan in dollars, test each scope in our kitchen cost calculator and change only the layout answer between runs.

Re-planning the kitchen: what changes when something moves

A re-plan is the easiest scope to underestimate. Moving a sink two metres sounds like a small change on a drawing. On site it means new waste and supply pipes, possibly through floor joists, plus framing, making good where the old fittings were, and sometimes a consent.

Schedule 1 of the Building Act exempts alterations to existing sanitary plumbing from consent, but only when an authorised plumber does the work and the total number of fixtures doesn't go up. MBIE's guidance is more cautious than the clause: where plumbing work could affect floor joists or wall framing, it may need consent. An island sink on a suspended timber floor in an older villa is exactly that situation. Ask Auckland Council or a Licensed Building Practitioner (LBP) about your specific layout before you commit to it.

The second sink nobody budgets for

A prep sink in the island, or a sink in a new scullery, is an additional sanitary fixture. Auckland Council requires a building consent when work adds a fixture where there wasn't one before. For minor plumbing work under $5,000 the council lists a $354 fixed fee with a certifying plumber's producer statement, plus a $201 inspection fee if the work isn't done by an approved installer, and it says it processes these within 20 working days. Lodge it before the cabinetry goes into production, or a finished scullery can sit dry while the paperwork catches up.

Shifting a gas hob to a new island means new pipework, which counts as an alteration to the gas installation. That puts it in the high-risk class under the gas regulations, with a certificate of compliance required before the job is complete. Going induction instead doesn't take the gasfitter off the list either: someone licensed still has to disconnect the old hob and make the supply safe, and then an electrician runs and certifies the new circuit. We set out the licence rules for each trade, task by task, in our breakdown of which kitchen trades need a licence.

Taking a wall out

Removing a non-structural internal wall is exempt from consent. The catch is that a wall carrying no roof load can still be a bracing element, and you can't tell by knocking on it. If the wall is load-bearing or bracing, the work needs a building consent and becomes Restricted Building Work that an LBP must carry out or supervise. Get an LBP or engineer's view on any wall before the new layout is drawn around its absence.

In a Mangere house that had been in the same family for 40 years, the brief was to open a closed-off kitchen into the dining and living areas. We extended the opening through to the living area, added steps down into the lounge, and built the kitchen around an extended engineered-stone island with handleless cabinetry, running the flooring continuously so the three spaces read as one.

The three-generation Avondale renovation went further. We moved the kitchen into the old formal dining room and took out the wall between the former kitchen and the living room to create one large living space. Relocating the kitchen meant running new waste pipes and plumbing to a completely different part of the house, so it needed council consent, and it happened inside a seven-month whole-house project with the family living elsewhere. Moving a kitchen is rarely just a kitchen job: the plumbing follows the sink, and the consent follows the plumbing.

Four questions that decide your scope before any quote

You can sort most kitchens into one of the three scopes with a torch, a tape measure and an honest half hour. Work through these in order.

1. Are the carcasses sound? Pull a door off under the sink and check for swelling and soft board. Sound boxes keep a refresh on the table. Failed boxes mean replacement at minimum.
2. Does the layout work for how you cook? List what annoys you every day. If the answers are all about looks, you're in refresh or replace territory. If they're about bench space, walkways or the corner cupboard, keep reading.
3. Does anything need to move? Mark the sink, hob, oven, dishwasher, rangehood and fridge on a floor plan of the new kitchen. Every item that shifts position is a trade booking, and possibly a consent.
4. Will the number of sinks change, or will a wall come out? Either one is the clearest sign you're in a re-plan, and both are the points at which Auckland Council and an LBP need to be part of the conversation.

Room width matters here too. An island needs a room roughly 3,500 to 4,000mm wide before it's even on the table, once you allow for the island itself, clearance on every working side and a bench run against the wall. Narrower than that, and a peninsula or a better L-shape is usually the honest answer.

How scope changes the programme and the contingency

Scope also decides how long you're without a kitchen, and how much buffer to hold back.

A standard Auckland kitchen renovation takes about five to six weeks from the day demolition starts, assuming the design is locked and the cabinetry is already made. Cabinetry manufacture alone runs four to six weeks, so it has to be ordered early or the whole programme waits on it. Projects with structural changes, an open-plan conversion or heavily custom elements typically run six to 12 weeks on site, and any consent processing sits in front of that. A refresh is the short end: a door swap is a day or two, though a new stone benchtop adds templating and fabrication time.

Our published guidance is a 10 to 20% contingency on top of the quoted cost, leaning towards 20% for a pre-1940s villa or bungalow. The reason is that older kitchens hide things. Pulling cabinets off an old wall is often the first proper look anyone has had at the wiring and pipes behind it, and the further your scope goes into walls and floors, the more of that you'll find. A same-footprint replacement in a 2000s Albany home and a re-plan in a Ponsonby villa should not carry the same buffer.

Two quotes for "a new kitchen" can be thousands of dollars apart and both be fair, because one assumes the sink stays and the other moves it. Settle the scope first and every quote you get prices the same job. That's the step our design team starts with, and it's why the Superior Renovations kitchen team draws the layout and marks every service point before anything is priced.

How much does it cost to renovate a kitchen in NZ?

A mid-range Auckland kitchen renovation costs $26,000 to $35,000, about $2,300 per square metre for a 10 to 12m² kitchen. Kitchens of 18m² and larger, or premium builds, run $62,000 to $138,000+. Where you land depends mostly on scope: a refresh usually sits below the mid-range band, and moving plumbing or walls pushes a kitchen above it.

A refresh is worth it when the carcasses are sound, the layout works and only the look is tired. If the boxes are swollen near the sink, or the layout frustrates you every day, new doors just delay the real job. Pull a door off and check the board before deciding.

Not always. Moving a sink can sit inside the Building Act's plumbing exemption if an authorised plumber does it and no fixture is added. Adding a second sink needs consent, and MBIE warns that plumbing affecting floor joists or framing may too. Confirm your layout with Auckland Council or an LBP.

Around five to six weeks on site for a standard replacement, once the design is locked and cabinetry is made, which takes four to six weeks on its own. Structural or open-plan re-plans typically take six to 12 weeks on site, plus any consent processing beforehand. A door-and-handle refresh can be done in one or two days.

Not sure which of the three scopes your kitchen is in? That's the first thing we'll work out with you, and you're welcome to see cabinetry and benchtop samples at our showroom at 16B Link Drive, Wairau Valley. Book a free consultation and bring a photo of your kitchen with the cupboard doors open, and we'll tell you honestly whether you need a refresh, a replacement or a re-plan. You can find more of our work at superiorrenovations.co.nz.