Quick answer
'Appliances by others' in a kitchen contract means the fridge, stove and dishwasher are supplied outside the joinery package, usually by the owner or main contractor. The joiner builds dimensioned gaps and provisions, the electrician wires, the plumber connects. The risk lives in the gaps between those trades, so a good spec names who owns each one.
Key points
- 'By others' covers supply of the fridge, stove and usually the dishwasher: procured outside the joinery package by the owner or main contractor.
- The joiner owns the dimensioned gap and provisions, the electrician owns wiring, the plumber owns water and waste, the main contractor owns sequence and protection.
- The classic failures: a 600 mm oven at a 595 mm gap, a fridge space with no ventilation clearance, a dishwasher with no adjacent power point.
- Joinery is cut to appliance dimensions, so the appliance schedule with exact models must be fixed before manufacture.
- A good joinery spec records gap widths in millimetres, marks services, and carries a responsibility table.
The oven turns up in week nine. It is the model on the schedule, nominally 600 mm, and the gap waiting for it in the joinery measures 595 mm because somebody trimmed the run to save a filler panel. The sparky has roughed in for a freestanding stove, the schedule now says built-in, and the site manager is on the phone asking whose problem this is. Everyone on that call did their own job correctly. The job that nobody did was the boundary between them.
'Appliances by others' is one line in the contract and it hides four trades' worth of coordination. On a volume programme the line is nearly universal, because the owner buys a hundred identical ovens sharper than any joiner can, and the joinery package deliberately stops at the gap. That split is sensible. It only fails when the gap itself has no owner, no dimensions and no paper trail, and then it fails in millimetres, at week nine, in every unit at once.
Here is what the phrase actually covers, who does what at the appliance wall, the three failures that account for most of the grief, and what a joinery spec should record so the oven slides in first time.
What does 'appliances by others' actually mean?
It means the appliances are excluded from the kitchen supplier's scope: not priced, not supplied, not warranted by the joiner. The fridge and stove sit outside the package on almost every programme, and the dishwasher usually does too. The owner or main contractor procures them on their own account, often at volume pricing the joinery contract could never reach, with the manufacturer's warranty running direct. On social-housing packages this is standard fit-out logic, and it is one of the defining features of the volume kitchen as a product class: the joinery repeats, and the appliances arrive down a separate pipe.
What the phrase does not mean is that the kitchen supplier can ignore appliances. The joinery is cut around them: gap widths, cavity heights, bench clearances, panel returns, all driven by the exact models chosen. 'By others' excludes the supply. It cannot exclude the dimensions.
Who does what at the appliance wall
Four parties meet at every appliance position, and each owns a different slice. The joiner builds the gap to documented dimensions and supplies the provisions: the panels, the fixing points, the toe-kick returns either side. The electrician runs the circuits and mounts the power points where the joinery drawings say. The plumber brings water and waste to the dishwasher and the fridge if it is plumbed. The main contractor sequences all of it and protects appliances that land on site before their install window.
The responsibility matrix at the appliance wall. Every row needs exactly one owner.
The matrix is trivial to draw and routinely missing. Without it, every boundary defaults to 'someone else', and the main contractor discovers at install week that nobody priced moving eight ovens up a staircase or that the fridge circuit landed behind the pantry. Put the table in the spec, name the parties, and the arguments mostly evaporate before they start. Sequencing those parties on site is its own craft, covered in coordinating the kitchen install with other trades.
The three classic failures
Ask anyone who installs kitchens at volume and the same three failures come back, every time, in every price band.
| Failure | Root cause | Fix before manufacture |
|---|---|---|
| 600 mm oven at a 595 mm gap | Run trimmed on site or gap never dimensioned off the real model | Gap width in millimetres on the drawings, checked against the model's install sheet |
| Fridge space with no ventilation clearance | Cavity sized to the fridge body with no air path | Clearance per the model's install sheet documented top, back or side |
| Dishwasher with no adjacent power point | Sparky roughed in before the appliance schedule existed | Services marked on the joinery drawings, schedule issued to all trades |
All three share a root: the joinery, the wiring or the plumbing was built to a category ('a 600 oven', 'a standard fridge') instead of a model. Categories do not have installation sheets. Models do, and the sheet is where the real numbers live: the exact aperture, the clearance the compressor needs to shed heat, where the connection has to sit relative to the cabinet. A fridge jammed in a tight cavity with no airflow runs hot and dies young, and nobody warranties a defect the cavity caused.
Dimensions the joinery needs before manufacture
The gaps live inside the standard kitchen geometry: 600 mm is the default module, the bench lands at 900 mm off a 150 mm toe kick and 720 mm carcass, and appliance positions have to respect all of it, which is why they get planned with the run, not after it. The wider logic of those modules is laid out in standard kitchen sizes for NZ townhouses. Per appliance, the joinery drawings should record the gap or cavity width in millimetres, the height where it matters, and the services position.
| Appliance | Joinery provision | Services noted |
|---|---|---|
| Stove or oven and hob | Gap or cavity width in mm off the model's install sheet | Circuit and isolation position |
| Fridge | Cavity width, height and ventilation clearance | Power point clear of the cavity; water if plumbed |
| Dishwasher | Gap width beside the wet cabinet | Power point adjacent, water and waste within reach |
| Rangehood | Cabinet or flue provision over the cooker | Ducting route and switch position |
Where do those numbers get locked? On the shop drawings, which is the document where the joiner's intent becomes checkable: every gap dimensioned, every panel called up, every service position marked for the other trades to build to. Approving them properly is the cheapest quality gate on the whole package, and kitchen shop drawings and how to approve them walks through what to look for. Sign off a shop drawing with a dimensioned 600 mm gap and the week-nine phone call cannot happen, because either the gap matches the sheet or the error is visible on paper months earlier.
Every appliance disaster on site was a paperwork gap first. The millimetres just make it visible.
Damage, storage and the space between trades
Supply 'by others' creates a second boundary people forget: time. Appliances often land on site weeks before their install window, and a stack of ovens in a garage is nobody's contractual property until someone signs for it. Scratched fridge doors and dented oven fascias surface at handover, every party points at the other two, and the cost lands wherever the paper is weakest. The fix is the same as everywhere else in this piece: the responsibility table names who receives, stores and protects, and the delivery is booked into the programme rather than arriving when the retailer felt like it.
Sequence matters as much as ownership. The joinery wants to go in after GIB and flooring; the appliances want to go in after the joinery and before the final services connections are certified. An oven that arrives before its gap exists gets moved four times, and every move is a chance to damage it or the finished units around it. Late appliance decisions are one of the quiet drivers of kitchen install delays, because a missing model number stalls the run even when every cabinet is on site.
Before the boxes are cut
The practical checkpoint is manufacture. Before the first panel is cut, the appliance schedule should name exact models, the shop drawings should carry the gap dimensions off those models' install sheets, the services positions should be marked and issued to the trades, and the responsibility table should have one name in every box. That is an hour of coordination, once, against a defect that otherwise repeats across every unit on the programme.
We build to appliance schedules every week from our East Tāmaki workshop, and where a schedule is late we say so before cutting rather than after, because a 595 mm gap helps nobody. Send your plans and the appliance schedule, or send the plans and tell us the schedule is still moving, and a quote with the provisions documented comes back within 24 hours with a reference number. The oven should slide in first time, in unit one and in unit forty.
Frequently asked questions
What does appliances by others mean in a building contract?
It means the appliances, typically the fridge, stove and often the dishwasher, are supplied outside that contractor's scope, usually procured by the owner or main contractor on their own account. The kitchen joiner excludes appliance supply but still builds the dimensioned gaps, panels and provisions for them, the electrician wires them, and the plumber connects water and waste. The phrase excludes supply, never the dimensions.
Who installs the oven in a new build?
Split it into parts. The joiner provides the gap or cavity to the documented dimension, the electrician wires the circuit and connects or hard-wires the oven, and physically placing it is usually the main contractor's or appliance supplier's arranged task. What matters is that the contract names one owner for each part, because 'the oven install' spans at least two trades and an unowned step becomes a handover defect.
What size gap does a 600 mm oven need in the joinery?
Whatever that exact model's installation sheet says, which is the honest answer. Nominal 600 mm appliances differ in body width, depth and clearance requirements between models, so a gap cut to the category rather than the sheet is how a 595 mm problem happens. The joinery spec should record the model and the millimetre dimension from its install sheet before manufacture, then nobody has to guess.
Who is responsible if the fridge doesn't fit the gap?
Whoever's document failed. If the spec recorded the model and the joiner cut a different dimension, that is a joinery defect. If the schedule changed models after manufacture, the change owner carries it. If no one ever documented the model or dimension, it lands on the main contractor by default, which is why the appliance page and responsibility table belong in the spec before cutting, not in the argument afterwards.
Does the kitchen company connect the dishwasher?
Normally no. The joiner leaves the dimensioned gap, commonly beside the sink cabinet so water and waste are within reach, the plumber makes the water and waste connections, and the electrician provides the adjacent power point. Some supply-and-install kitchen contracts include placing the machine in its gap, but the certified connections belong to the licensed trades. Check which of those steps your contract actually includes.
Why does a fridge space need a ventilation gap?
A fridge sheds heat from its compressor and coils, and it needs an air path, at the top, back or sides per the model's installation sheet, to do it. Build the cavity tight to the body with no clearance and the machine runs hot, works harder and fails early, and the failure reads as an appliance fault when it is really a cabinetry one. Document the clearance in the joinery spec like any other dimension.
When should the appliance schedule be finalised?
Before joinery manufacture, without exception. The gaps, cavities and services positions are all cut and roughed in from the models on the schedule, so a change after cutting means rework, and on a volume run it means rework multiplied by every unit already cut. Lock exact models as part of the spec sign-off, issue the schedule to the joiner and both services trades, and date any change that follows.