Quick answer
Measure your kitchen wall-to-wall in millimetres, recording each run's length, ceiling height, and the position of windows, doors, power points and plumbing. A rough floor plan with these numbers is enough for an initial quote; MTN Kitchens still does a precise on-site measure before manufacture.
Here's the honest version: a tape measure and twenty minutes will get you a ballpark quote, and a ballpark quote is all you need at the start. People get nervous about this part. They think a measuring mistake means they've bought the wrong kitchen. They haven't. Nothing gets cut to your numbers. We use what you send to scope the job, work out cabinet runs, count drawer banks and price the benchtop. Then, before a single sheet of melteca goes through the saw, one of our installers comes to site and measures it properly. Your numbers get us in the door fast. Ours keep it accurate.
Twenty minutes gets you a ballpark
So this guide is about that first step. What to record, how to record it so it's actually useful, and the handful of errors that turn a clean quote into three rounds of emails. Do it well and you'll have trade pricing back inside 24 hours. Do it badly and you'll get a quote full of caveats and assumptions, which helps nobody. We've measured 2,000-plus kitchens out of our East Tamaki workshop over 23 years, so the mistakes in this article aren't hypothetical. They're the ones that land in our inbox every week.
Key points
- Your DIY measure is for quoting only — nothing is manufactured off your numbers, so don't lose sleep over a millimetre.
- Record walls, ceiling height, and the position of every window, door, power point, and service — not just cabinet lengths.
- The big errors: measuring at one height only, forgetting the skirting, and ignoring where the water and waste actually come out.
- A site measure by our installer always happens before manufacture — that's the one that gets cut to.
- Send a rough plan plus photos and you'll have a trade quote back within 24 hours.
What the measure is actually for
There are two measures in any kitchen job and they do different jobs. The quote measure — the one you're doing — tells us the size and shape of the room and roughly what fits. From that we work out the cabinet layout, how many doors and drawers, the benchtop area, the splashback run, and where the appliances sit. That's enough to price the whole thing: supply, install, one contract, one invoice.
The manufacture measure — the site measure — happens later, after you've accepted the quote and the layout is locked. That one's done by an installer with a laser, and it's the set of numbers we cut to. The two exist because rooms lie. A wall that reads 3000mm on the architect's plan is rarely 3000mm in the flesh once the GIB and plaster are on. If we built to plan dimensions on a renovation, we'd be filling gaps with scribe panels all day. So your job isn't to be perfect. It's to be honest and complete.
The kit you need
Nothing flash. A 5-metre tape (the little 3m ones run out halfway across a benchtop), a pencil, and paper. A laser measure is nice if you've got one but it's not required. Your phone's camera is the most important tool you own here — photos catch the things you forget to write down, and we'd rather have ten photos than a tidy diagram.
- A steel tape, 5m or longer — cloth tapes stretch and lie to you.
- A pencil and a clipboard or stiff paper, not a phone notes app you'll fat-finger.
- Your phone camera, charged, for wide shots and close-ups of every service point.
- A torch or your phone light to read the back of the cabinets and under the sink.
Draw the room first, dimensions second
Start with a rough plan view — bird's eye, looking down. Don't try to make it neat or to scale. Sketch the walls of the kitchen as a box, then mark the door you walk in through and any other openings. Once the shape's on paper, you've got somewhere to hang every number. People who skip this step end up with a page of measurements and no idea which wall is which.
Label your walls. Wall A, B, C, D, going clockwise from the entry. Every measurement you take from here on gets written against a wall and a feature, so when we read it back we know exactly where it lives. "Wall B, window starts 600 from the corner, 1200 wide" is gold. "Window 1200" floating in space is useless.
Measure each wall three times, at three heights
This is the single most useful habit. Measure each wall's length at the floor, at benchtop height (roughly 900mm), and up high where the overhead cabinets land (around 1500mm). Walls in Auckland villas and even newer townhouses are not square or plumb. A wall can be 20mm tighter at the top than the bottom. Recording all three heights tells us whether we're dealing with a straightforward run or a room that needs scribing, and it stops the benchtop being ordered to a length that fights the wall.
What to record, point by point
Here's the full list. Work around the room methodically rather than jumping about — corner to corner, low then high, and note every interruption in the wall as you pass it.
| Item | What to record | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Wall lengths | Corner to corner, at floor / 900mm / 1500mm | Sets cabinet runs and flags out-of-square walls |
| Ceiling height | Floor to ceiling, both ends of the run | Decides overhead cabinet height and bulkheads |
| Windows | Width, height, and distance from each corner; sill height off floor | Cabinets and splashback have to work around them |
| Doors | Width, swing direction, distance from corner | A door swing can kill a cabinet or an island |
| Services | Position of water in/out, waste, gas, power points, switchboard | Moving plumbing or wiring changes the price |
| Existing appliances | Make, size, and whether they're staying | Fridge, oven and dishwasher openings must fit |
Services are where money hides
Cabinets are the easy part. The line items that move a quote up or down are usually the services — water, waste, gas, power. So when you measure, treat every tap, every power point, the waste pipe under the sink and the meter box as a thing to record, not background furniture. Photograph under the sink. Photograph the wall behind where the oven goes. Note where the rangehood ducting runs, if it runs at all.
Why this matters for your quote: keep the sink, hob and oven roughly where they are now and the job stays clean. Shift the sink to the island and you've got a plumber running new water and waste across the room, plus a sparky for the dishwasher and waste disposal. That's real cost, and it's the kind of thing we'd rather flag in the quote than discover on install day. If you're weighing up a layout change, our piece on kitchen layouts explained walks through what each shape demands of the services.
The rangehood question
Note whether your current rangehood ducts outside or just recirculates. If you want ducted and you haven't got it, someone's cutting through a wall or running a duct through the ceiling, and that's a coordination job with the builder. We cover the trade-off properly in rangehood and ventilation: ducted vs recirculating, but for the measure, just tell us what's there now.
Ceiling height and the things above your head
Measure floor to ceiling at both ends of each cabinet run, because ceilings in older Auckland homes slope more than you'd think. This number decides whether overhead cabinets go to the ceiling, stop short with a gap, or need a bulkhead built down to meet them. It also flags whether a tall pantry or an integrated fridge will physically fit upright in the space.
While you're looking up, note any bulkheads, beams, or that boxed-in section hiding old ducting. Photograph them. These are the things that don't show on a plan and ambush an install if nobody mentions them. If you're planning a scullery or a run of tall cabinetry, height is the make-or-break dimension — see scullery and butler's pantry design for NZ homes for how that plays out.
A worked example: a Mt Albert villa renovation
Say you're redoing the kitchen in a 1920s villa in Mt Albert. Galley-ish, one long wall and a short return, a window over the sink, a door to the laundry at one end. You sketch the room, label the long wall A and the return wall B, and start measuring.
Wall A reads 3640mm at the floor, 3625mm at benchtop height, 3610mm up high — so it's tightening 30mm top to bottom, classic old-house lean. You note all three. The window on Wall A starts 720mm from the corner, is 1100mm wide, with the sill 1080mm off the floor. The waste and water sit dead centre under the window where the sink's always been. Wall B is 2100mm, with the laundry door at the far end swinging into the room, 760mm wide. Ceiling's 2700mm at one end and 2680mm at the other.
That's a complete quote measure. From it we can price a benchtop that respects the lean, overheads that suit a 2680mm ceiling, a sink cabinet centred on the existing services so no plumber's needed, and we know the laundry door swing rules out a cabinet in that corner. You took fifteen photos and spent twenty-five minutes. We quote it inside 24 hours. The site measure later confirms the lean and the exact services — but the price you saw won't move unless you change the design. For the budgeting side of a job like this, renovating a kitchen without blowing the budget is worth a read.
Where a home measure goes wrong
The errors we see every week
After enough quotes, the same handful of mistakes turn up over and over. None of them are fatal — the site measure catches all of them — but they slow the quote down because we have to come back and ask. Get these right and your quote turns around faster and cleaner.
- Measuring length at one height only, so we can't tell if the wall's square.
- Measuring at floor level and forgetting the skirting steals width.
- Recording cabinet sizes instead of wall sizes — we want the room, not your guess at what fits.
- Leaving services off entirely, so the quote can't tell whether plumbing moves.
- No corner-to-feature dimensions, so a window is the right width but floating in space.
- Forgetting the door swing, then wondering why the island won't fit.
- Sending tidy numbers with no photos — the photos are half the value.
Nine times out of ten the homeowner's measure is fine for pricing. It's the photos that save us — I can see the dodgy bulkhead and the waste pipe before I've even left the workshop.
Why a site measure still happens
Even if you're a builder and your measure is dead accurate, we still site-measure before manufacture. It's not us doubting you — it's how we keep our 5-7 day single install tight and callback-free. Cabinets and benchtops are cut to fractions of a millimetre. If the manufacture set is 5mm out across a 3.6m run, you get gaps and packers, and a kitchen that looks like it was fought into place rather than built for the room.
The site measure also locks timing. On a renovation we usually measure once the old kitchen's out and the GIB's up, because that's the room we're actually building into — not the room with the old cabinets still on the wall. On a new build it slots into the construction programme after lining and before we install. Either way, the quote you accepted is based on your measure, and the site measure protects it. The deeper version of this is in site measure vs plan measure: getting kitchen dimensions right, and the full path from order to fitted kitchen is laid out in what to expect: from kitchen order to install.
Benchtops, finishes and what your measure unlocks
Your measure does more than size cabinets — it tells us the benchtop area and the splashback run, which is where material choice starts to move the price. A 3.6m laminate top is a different number to the same run in engineered stone, and the join positions depend on the room shape you've drawn. Send an accurate plan and we can price the benchtop properly the first time rather than estimating square metres blind.
We run benchtops from laminate up through engineered and natural stone, and finishes across 2-pac lacquer, melteca and melamine, and timber. The measure doesn't decide your finish, but it does decide how much of it you're buying. If you're still choosing, laminate vs stone benchtops: cost vs value and kitchen cabinet finishes explained cover the real differences. And if you want to understand what's actually in the number we send back, how to read a kitchen quote and spot hidden costs is the companion to this one.
Sending it to us
You don't need a CAD file. A photographed hand sketch with your wall labels and dimensions, plus a set of room photos, is exactly what we want. If you've got an architect's plan or an AI-generated concept drawing, send that too — we'll read it alongside your measure rather than instead of it, because the plan tells us intent and your measure tells us reality.
For developers and builders running multiple units, the brief looks different — one typical unit measured properly plus the unit count usually gets us most of the way, because the layouts repeat. We quote off a representative measure and confirm with site measures unit by unit. If that's you, keeping kitchen spec consistent across 30+ units and kitchen lead times and your construction programme are the relevant reads.
Frequently asked questions
Do I really need to measure, or can you just come out?
You don't have to, but a rough measure and photos let us quote within 24 hours without a site visit. We measure properly later, before manufacture, on any job we win. The DIY measure just gets you a fast, accurate number up front.
What if my measurements are wrong?
They almost certainly are, by a few millimetres, and that's fine. Nothing is cut to your numbers. The site measure done by our installer is what we manufacture from. Your measure is only there to scope and price the job.
How accurate does the quote measure need to be?
Within 10-20mm on wall lengths is plenty. What matters more is completeness — all the walls, the windows and doors, the services, and the ceiling height. A complete measure that's slightly off beats a precise one that's missing the plumbing.
Why do you site-measure if I've already measured?
Because we cut cabinets and benchtops to fractions of a millimetre, and rooms move during a build. The site measure protects the price you accepted and keeps the install to 5-7 days with no packers and no callbacks.
What's the most common mistake you see?
Measuring at one height only, and forgetting the skirting. Walls in Auckland homes lean and aren't square, so we need the length at floor, benchtop and overhead height. And measure above the skirting, where the cabinets actually sit.
Can I just send photos without measurements?
Photos alone get us a rough idea but not a firm price. Send both — a labelled sketch with dimensions for the numbers, and photos for everything you forgot to write down. Together they're enough for a real quote.
That's the whole job. Sketch the room, label the walls, measure each one at three heights, mark every window, door and service, photograph the lot, and send it through. For a single home or a hundred-unit development, the principle's the same — give us the room as it really is and we'll give you a real trade price, no showroom markup, within 24 hours. Send your brief, your sketch, or your unit count and we'll turn a quote around fast.