Quick answer
A typical Auckland kitchen renovation runs 6 to 10 weeks from sign-off: final measure up front, 3 to 5 weeks of cabinetry manufacture while your old kitchen still works, then 1 to 2 weeks on site for demo, services, install and finishing. MTN Kitchens supplies and installs to keep these stages tight.
Most people ask how long a kitchen takes and want a single number back. There isn't one. There's the build programme, and then there's everything around it that nobody put in the calendar. A straight cabinet swap in a tidy Mt Eden villa runs differently to a full reno where you're moving plumbing, opening a wall to the dining room, and waiting on an electrician who's also booked on three other sites. The install itself is the short part. Ours runs five to seven days on most jobs. The weeks on either side are where reno timelines actually live or die.
Where the eight weeks actually go
After 23 years and 2,000-plus kitchens out of our East Tamaki workshop, the pattern is the same on nearly every residential reno. The job slips for one of three reasons: the measure happened too early, a service trade wasn't booked in time, or a decision dragged. None of those are manufacturing problems. So this is a week-by-week of how a real Auckland kitchen reno runs, where the slack actually is, and the moves that keep it tight. Numbers are ranges, because your job isn't the last one.
Key points
- A typical residential reno runs 6 to 10 weeks from sign-off to a finished, working kitchen. Manufacture is a fixed chunk; the variability is yours.
- Manufacture takes roughly 3 to 5 weeks and runs in our workshop while your site work happens. It is not on the critical path if you sequence it right.
- Install is 5 to 7 days. Stone benchtops add a measure-and-template gap of around a week in the middle of that.
- The slip almost always comes from late decisions, an unbooked sparky or plumber, or a measure taken off old plans.
- Book your service trades the day you sign off the kitchen, not the week before install.
What "the timeline" actually covers
When a homeowner says "how long," they usually mean "how long can't I cook in my kitchen." That's a different question to how long the whole project takes. The build programme starts at sign-off and the meter doesn't really run until demo day, but the manufacturing clock starts the moment your final measure is locked and your colours and hardware are confirmed. Those two clocks overlap, which is the whole trick to keeping a reno short.
Here's the shape of it. Sign-off and deposit. Final site measure. Three to five weeks of manufacture happening in the background while your old kitchen still works. Then a tight run: demo, services rough-in, install, benchtop template and fit, splashback, connect, finish. For a like-for-like layout with laminate tops you're at the short end. Move the plumbing and the wall, go to natural stone, add a scullery, and you stretch the back end. The front end barely moves.
One thing to get straight early: supply and install as one contract changes the timeline more than people expect. When the same outfit manufactures and installs, there's no handover gap, no "the cabinets arrived but the fitter's on another job," no finger-pointing if a measure's out by 5mm. One contract, one invoice, one programme. If you're piecing it together from a flat-pack supplier and a separate fitter, add coordination time and add risk. There's a full breakdown of that in What to Expect: From Kitchen Order to Install.
Week 0: quote, sign-off and the decisions that gate everything
This is the week nobody counts and it's the one that sets your finish date. We turn quotes around in 24 hours, so getting a price isn't the holdup. The holdup is you. Cabinet layout, door finish, benchtop material, handle choice, where the sink and hob land, whether you want a scullery. Every one of those is a decision that has to be locked before the workshop can cut anything.
The jobs that run late are nearly always the ones where someone's still deciding on benchtop colour in week three. Once we're in manufacture, a change isn't a phone call, it's a re-cut and a reprogramme of the workshop run. Decide the slow stuff now: layout, finish family, benchtop material. The fast stuff, handle finish, paint colour on a 2-pac door, you've got a bit more room on, but not much. If colour's giving you grief, Choosing a Benchtop Colour That Lasts and Choosing Kitchen Handles and Hardware That Last will save you a fortnight of dithering.
Weeks 1 to 5: final measure and manufacture (the part that runs itself)
Once you've signed off, we do a final site measure. This matters more than any other single step. A measure off the plans or off the old kitchen is how you get a 15mm gap at the end of a run or a benchtop that doesn't sit. We measure the actual opening, the actual wall, the actual out-of-square corner, because Auckland villas are rarely square and 90s townhouses are worse. If you want the detail on why this is non-negotiable, Site Measure vs Plan Measure covers it properly.
Then manufacture. Three to five weeks depending on finish and how busy the workshop is. 2-pac lacquer doors take longer than melteca because they're sprayed and cured, not just cut and edged. This whole stretch happens at East Tamaki while your existing kitchen still works. That's the point. You keep cooking. The countdown to "no kitchen" hasn't started. A reno that's sequenced well has the new cabinets sitting wrapped and ready before the old ones come out.
Week 6: demo, then services rough-in
Demo is fast. A day, sometimes two if there's tiling to chase off or a wall coming out. The old kitchen comes out, you cap the services, you check what's behind the cabinets. This is where surprises live: a slow leak that's rotted the GIB, dodgy old wiring, a waste pipe that's not where the plans said. Budget a contingency day here on any house over about 30 years old. It's not pessimism, it's Auckland housing stock.
If you're moving the layout, services rough-in comes straight after demo and before the cabinets go in. Plumber relocates the waste and supply, sparky runs new circuits for the hob, oven, rangehood and under-cabinet lighting, and roughs in the points. This is the hard dependency that wrecks programmes: cabinets cannot go in until the rough-in is done and, on a notifiable job, inspected. If your sparky no-shows, the whole job stops. There's no working around it. This is exactly why you booked them in week 2.
When the work is notifiable
Most kitchen renos are non-notifiable if you're not touching structure or moving the kitchen's footprint significantly. Swap cabinets, keep the layout, you're usually fine. But move a wall, alter bracing, or change the building's structure and you're into building consent and a council inspection, which adds time you don't control. Restricted Building Work needs a Licensed Building Practitioner and the paperwork that comes with it. If a consent's involved, your timeline now has the council in it, and the council moves at the council's pace. Coordinating all this against the other trades is its own skill, covered in Coordinating Kitchen Install With Your Other Trades.
Week 6 to 7: cabinet install
This is the part people picture when they think "kitchen install," and it's the most predictable. Cabinets land, get levelled and scribed to the wall, fixed off, drawers and doors hung and adjusted. A standard residential layout is two to three days for the carcasses and faces. An out-of-square wall or a tricky corner adds time, but a good fitter scribes a clean line into a wonky villa wall and you'd never know. Soft-close runners and hinges get set here too, and getting that right first time is what stops callbacks later, which we get into in Soft-Close, Drawers and the Details That Reduce Callbacks.
With cabinets in and levelled, the benchtop gets templated. And here's the bit that catches people out: if you're going engineered or natural stone, the template happens after the cabinets are installed, then the slab goes back to the stone fabricator, gets cut and polished, and comes back for fit. That's a gap. Usually around a week, sometimes a bit more on natural stone. Laminate tops don't have this gap, they can be made to measure off the cabinet run much faster. That single difference is often a week of timeline. The full cost-and-time trade-off is in Laminate vs Stone Benchtops: Cost vs Value.
| Benchtop | Lead after template | Timeline impact |
|---|---|---|
| Laminate | 2 to 4 days | Shortest. Cut to measure, no slab gap. |
| Engineered stone | About 1 week | Adds a templated-and-return gap mid-install. |
| Natural stone | 1 to 2 weeks | Longest. Slab selection plus fabrication. |
Week 7 to 8: benchtop fit, splashback, connect and finish
Benchtop comes back and gets fitted, sink and hob cut-outs already done at the fabricator. Once the top's on, the plumber connects the sink, waste and any filtered tap, and the sparky connects the hob, oven and rangehood and does the final electrical. The splashback goes in around here, tiled, glass or a stone upstand, and tiling has its own dry time, so it can add a day or two depending on what you've chosen. The options trade-off is laid out in Kitchen Splashback Options Compared.
One real reno, start to finish
Then the finishing: handles on, doors and drawers given a final adjust, kickboards fitted, silicone and seals, a clean and a snag list. This last stretch feels slow because it's a lot of small jobs by different people in sequence, not because anything's gone wrong. A good outfit walks the kitchen with you, lists the snags, and closes them out. That's the difference between "installed" and "finished," and it's where quality control earns its keep, which we run through in How Kitchens Are Quality-Checked at Every Stage.
The install was never the bit that ran late. It was the homeowner who couldn't pick a handle, and the sparky who got pulled onto another site. Lock those two down and I'll hand you a finished kitchen in a week.
A worked example: a Te Atatu reno
Three-bedroom 1970s house in Te Atatu Peninsula. Owners wanted to open the galley into the dining room, relocate the sink under the new window, engineered stone tops, 2-pac doors in a soft white, melteca interiors. Here's how it actually ran.
- Week 0: quote back in 24 hours, two weeks of the owners deciding on stone colour and door white. This is the part they controlled and it's where most of the early slack went.
- Weeks 1 to 5: final measure on day three after sign-off, then 2-pac manufacture in the workshop. Owners kept cooking the whole time. They booked the plumber and sparky in week 2.
- Week 6, Monday to Tuesday: demo and a wall section out (non-structural, checked first). Found old wiring, sparky's already booked so no scramble.
- Week 6, Wednesday to Friday: rough-in for the relocated sink and new hob circuit, then cabinets land Thursday and go in.
- Week 7: benchtop templated Monday, back and fitted the following Monday. That week was the wait. Splashback tiled, everything connected.
- Week 8, early: handles, snag list, clean, done.
Eight weeks sign-off to finished, with the kitchen itself out of action for about ten days. The two weeks of deciding in week 0 were the owners'. The one-week stone gap was physics. Everything else ran tight because the trades were booked early and nobody changed their mind after deposit. That's a textbook clean run, and it's repeatable.
Where it slips, and how to keep it tight
Five things blow reno timelines, in roughly the order they bite. First, late decisions, already covered, the single biggest one. Second, an unbooked or no-show service trade, because rough-in is a hard gate before cabinets and connect is a hard gate before you can cook. Third, a measure taken too early or off old plans, which surfaces as a fit problem on install day when it's most expensive to solve.
Fourth, the benchtop slab gap, which isn't a delay so much as a stage people forget to plan for, then act surprised. Fifth, hidden site conditions in older homes: rot, asbestos in pre-2000 textured ceilings or vinyl, wiring that doesn't meet current code. You can't fully eliminate these, but a contingency day and a good demo-day inspection mean they don't become week-long stalls. A whole article on this exists, How to Avoid Kitchen Install Delays, and it's worth a read before you set a date.
How to compress the programme without cutting corners
If you genuinely need it fast, the levers are clear. Keep the existing layout, no moving sink or hob means no rough-in gate and a much shorter services window. Choose laminate or made-to-measure tops over stone to skip the template-and-return gap. Pick melteca or melamine over 2-pac to shave manufacture time. Lock every decision before deposit. Book trades the day you sign off. Do those and a like-for-like reno can run inside a fortnight on site.
What you don't do is compress by skipping the measure, rushing the rough-in inspection, or installing the benchtop before the cabinets are properly levelled. Those aren't time savings, they're callbacks with a delay attached. The reno that finishes fastest is the one that's sequenced properly, not the one where someone tried to do two stages at once. If budget is also tight, Renovating a Kitchen Without Blowing the Budget pairs well with this, because the cheapest reno and the fastest reno usually want the same decisions.
Frequently asked questions
How long without a working kitchen?
On a typical reno, about 7 to 12 days from demo to a connected, working kitchen. The cabinets-in to connect stretch is the no-cooking window, and a stone benchtop adds roughly a week inside it for template and fabrication.
Can you manufacture while we still use our old kitchen?
Yes, and you should. Manufacture runs 3 to 5 weeks in our East Tamaki workshop while your existing kitchen stays in use. Demo only happens once the new cabinets are built and ready, so your kitchen-down time is as short as possible.
Why does a stone benchtop add time?
Stone is templated after the cabinets are installed, then cut and polished at the fabricator and returned for fit. That round trip is about a week for engineered stone, longer for natural. Laminate is made to measure with no slab gap.
Do I need consent for a kitchen reno?
Usually not if you keep the footprint and don't touch structure. Move a wall, alter bracing or do Restricted Building Work and you'll need consent, an LBP and a council inspection, which adds time you don't fully control.
What's the single biggest cause of delay?
Late decisions. A benchtop or finish change after manufacture starts means a re-cut and can push your install a full week. Lock layout, finish and benchtop before deposit and most of the risk disappears.
How fast can you quote?
Within 24 hours. Send the plans or a rough sketch with measurements and we'll turn a trade-priced quote around the next day, with no showroom markup baked in.
If you've got a reno coming up, send us your plans or a sketch with rough measurements and tell us your finish and benchtop preference. We quote within 24 hours, manufacture in our own East Tamaki workshop, and supply and install on one contract and one invoice, trade-priced with no showroom markup. Tell us your target finish date and we'll tell you straight whether it's realistic and how to sequence it to hit it.