Quick answer
In almost every case, yes — you can replace the kitchen in the main house while an unconsented sleepout or garage conversion sits unresolved on the LIM. A like-for-like kitchen swap, using comparable components in the same position, usually falls inside the Schedule 1 exemption in the Building Act 2004 and needs no building consent at all, so the council's file on the other structure has no hold over it. The two problems genuinely collide in only two situations: when the kitchen you want is going into the unconsented building itself, because under the Auckland Unitary Plan a food preparation facility is precisely what turns an accessory building into a dwelling; and when new cabinetry or linings would conceal work a council inspector needs to see for a certificate of acceptance. Outside those two, do the kitchen and run the paperwork on its own track.
Key points
- A like-for-like kitchen replacement in the same position usually sits inside the Schedule 1 exemption and needs no building consent, which means an unresolved requisition on your LIM does not block it.
- The Auckland Unitary Plan defines a dwelling as living accommodation "served by a food preparation facility/kitchen" — so putting a kitchen in an unconsented sleepout isn't a kitchen job, it's a change to what the building legally is.
- The granny flat exemption that took effect on 15 January 2026 only covers wholly new standalone dwellings; MBIE guidance expressly rules out existing structures such as garages or sleepouts, so it will not legalise what's already out the back.
- A certificate of acceptance is assessed against the Building Code current at the date you apply, not the code that applied when the work was built, and its worth depends on how much of the work the council could actually inspect.
- If your new kitchen would line over framing or services an inspector needs to see, sequence the paperwork first — otherwise you pay twice to open it back up.
The kitchen and the paperwork are separate jobs.
The LIM lands on a Thursday. Three-bedroom brick-and-tile off Ranui Station Road, flat section, garage that someone has clearly been sleeping in, and there on page nine is a requisition: unauthorised building work, a sleepout the council has no record of ever consenting. Nobody in the current chain built it. The vendor inherited it. The vendor before that probably put it up over a long weekend and never told anyone. And the kitchen — the actual reason you're buying, the one you've already got a sketch of on your phone — is a tired melteca galley in the main house with a benchtop that's swollen at the sink.
Here's what happens next in about half these cases: nothing. For years. The buyer decides the whole property is "a compliance issue" and freezes, because the sleepout and the kitchen have been welded together in their head into one enormous problem. They're not one problem. They're two, they run under different law, and only one of them has anything to do with cabinetry. This piece is about telling them apart. It is not legal advice, and every property out west has its own overlays and its own history — confirm your specifics with Auckland Council and your LBP before you order anything.
The two problems are not the same problem
The kitchen in the main house is a Building Act question, and usually a very short one. The sleepout is a Building Act question *and* a Resource Management Act question, because the Auckland Unitary Plan has opinions about how many dwellings sit on a site and what they look like. Different statutes, different council teams, different timeframes. The kitchen is measured in weeks. The sleepout is measured in months, and sometimes in ownership cycles.
That distinction matters more in Swanson and Ranui than almost anywhere in Auckland, because the housing stock invites exactly this. Big flat sections off Metcalfe Road and Swanson Road. Post-war weatherboard and seventies brick-and-tile, most of it built when a section this size felt like a paddock. Two generations of owners who needed another bedroom and had a mate with a nail gun. Head further up toward the ranges and the same instinct produces cabins on poles at the bush edge, where bush-edge homes have their own moisture and access problems on top of everything else. The sleepout is close to a regional feature. It doesn't make your kitchen illegal.
What a like-for-like swap actually covers
Schedule 1 of the Building Act 2004 lists building work that doesn't need a consent. Clause 1.1 covers general repair, maintenance and replacement, and MBIE's guidance puts it plainly: replacement of any component or assembly incorporated in or associated with a building is exempt, provided a comparable component or assembly is used and the replacement is in the same position. Rip out the old carcasses, put new carcasses back where they were, hang new doors, drop a new benchtop on top. Same footprint, same sink position, same appliance positions. That's the exemption doing its job.
The word carrying the weight is *comparable*, and the second is *position*. Move the sink two metres to the other wall and you're into sanitary plumbing. Take out a wall to open the galley into the lounge and you're into structure. Both of those leave the exemption behind and land you in consent territory — which is fine, it's just a completely different job with a completely different programme. If the budget is the constraint and the layout is honestly fine, keeping the carcasses and replacing only the doors and benchtop keeps you deep inside the exemption and out of the council's inbox entirely.
The exclusions are the part people skim. MBIE's guidance is explicit that clause 1.1 does not stretch to complete or substantial replacement of a specified system, complete or substantial replacement of any component contributing to the building's structural behaviour or fire-safety properties, repair or replacement of anything that has failed to satisfy the Building Code for durability, or sanitary plumbing and drainlaying under the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Act 2006. Read that last one twice. Your kitchen has a sink in it.
- Comparable components, same position — inside the exemption.
- New fixed wiring, new circuits, extra power points — no building consent, but under the Electricity (Safety) Regulations 2010 general prescribed electrical work isn't complete until a certificate of compliance is issued for it. Get that certificate and file it.
- Anything that counts as sanitary plumbing or drainlaying — carved out of clause 1.1 and must be done by the right registered person.
- Structural work, fire-rated linings, specified systems — outside the exemption. Consent.
- Not sure which side of the line you're on — ask the council for a discretionary exemption or just apply for consent, rather than guessing and being wrong.
Collision one: the kitchen is what makes it a dwelling
This is the one that catches people, and it's worth being precise about because precision is the whole difference between a plan and a stall. Go and read the definitions chapter of the Auckland Unitary Plan. "Sleepout" isn't in it. Neither is "cabin", neither is "granny flat". Those are real-estate words. What the Unitary Plan defines is *dwelling*: living accommodation used or designed to be used for a residential purpose as a single household residence contained within one or more buildings, and served by a food preparation facility/kitchen.
And it goes on to define what a food preparation facility is. It includes all of the following: means for cooking food, food rinsing, utensil washing and waste water disposal; and space for food preparation, including a suitable surface, and food storage including a refrigerator or a perishable food storage area capable of being cooled. A minor dwelling, in the same chapter, is simply a dwelling that is secondary to the principal dwelling on the site. An accessory building is one used incidentally to another building on the site — and the definition expressly excludes dwellings.
Put those together and the conclusion is uncomfortable but clean. The kitchen is the legal trigger. It is the thing that converts an accessory building into a dwelling in the eyes of the plan. Auckland Council's own guidance for people building a sleepout or cabin is that they don't contain cooking or sanitary facilities and are associated with a main dwelling where those facilities are available. So if what you actually want is a kitchenette in the unconsented sleepout for your mother-in-law, stop calling it a kitchen job. You are proposing to create a second dwelling, on a site where the building it would live in has no consent. That is not two tracks. That is one track, and it starts with a planner, not a joiner.
A kitchen is what turns a sleepout into a dwelling.
Collision two: don't line over the evidence
The second collision is about sequencing, and it only bites when the unconsented work is physically tangled up with the kitchen — a lean-to the kitchen sits in, a re-lined wall behind the run, drainage that was rerouted when someone extended the back of the house.
The route for unconsented work is a certificate of acceptance, and the critical thing to understand about a CoA is that it is not a consent and never becomes one. MBIE's guidance says the value of a certificate of acceptance to the building owner and a potential buyer will ultimately depend on how much of the work the council was able to inspect. Councils will only certify the elements they can see. Their liability is limited to the extent they were able to inspect the work, and the certificate gets qualified to say so. A CoA on a structure where the inspector could see almost nothing is a thin piece of paper.
Which means if you install a new kitchen across a wall the council would need opened up, you have just made a future CoA worse and more expensive, permanently. Not illegal. Worse. You'll be paying a builder to pull out cabinetry you just paid for. If the unconsented work touches the kitchen zone at all, get the inspection sequence sorted before the site measure, not after the install.
That's worth sitting with, because it reframes the option. The exemption is genuinely useful in Swanson and Ranui — the sections are big enough, and 70m² of brand-new compliant dwelling with a PIM and a notification on completion is a far cleaner asset than a twenty-year-old shed with a requisition against it. But it is a *build a new one* pathway, not a *forgive the old one* pathway. For some owners the honest maths is that removing the unconsented structure and starting again under the exemption beats years of trying to certify someone else's framing. That's a conversation with a builder and a planner. Note too that development contributions still apply, and a mezzanine or loft counts as another storey and disqualifies it.
Running the paperwork on its own track
You can only apply for a certificate of acceptance for building work carried out without a consent from 1 July 1992 onwards. If the sleepout genuinely predates that, the CoA route isn't open to you at all, and what the council will accept as evidence instead is a conversation with them rather than something to guess at.
The nastiest detail is which code applies. MBIE's guidance for building officials states that certificates of acceptance are based on the Building Code at the time the application is made rather than what was in place when a consent was granted. Today's code. Not 1998's. That is why a CoA on an old sleepout is so often more work than people budget for — you're not proving it was acceptable then, you're proving it's acceptable now. Councils should process a CoA within 20 working days, and they can refuse it.
One more thing, and it's the reason not to treat a CoA as absolution: Auckland Council is clear that a certificate of acceptance doesn't have the same value as an approved building consent, and that issuing one for unconsented work doesn't limit the council's ability to take enforcement action — though where a CoA has been issued, they'll take that into account. It resolves the requisition. It does not rewrite history. Buyers and their lawyers know the difference, which matters if you're thinking about the kitchen as a resale move rather than just somewhere to cook.
| Question | Like-for-like kitchen, main house | Unconsented sleepout |
|---|---|---|
| Which law bites? | Building Act 2004, Schedule 1 exemption | Building Act 2004 plus the Auckland Unitary Plan |
| Building consent? | Usually none — comparable components, same position | Not available after the fact; the route is a certificate of acceptance |
| Shows on the LIM? | No | Yes, as a requisition, until it's resolved |
| Who signs it off? | Nobody inspects it — but you keep the electrician's certificate of compliance, and a registered plumber or drainlayer does any sanitary plumbing | The council, if it issues a certificate of acceptance |
| Which Building Code applies? | Current code, to any new work | The code current at the date you apply, not the date it was built |
| Realistic timeframe | Weeks — a single kitchen installs over five to seven days | Months, and dependent on council and on what can be inspected |
| Does it block the other? | No | No — unless collision one or collision two applies |
Half the jobs we walk into out west have something round the back that nobody's got a bit of paper for. It's never the kitchen that's the problem. It's that everyone's frozen the kitchen waiting on the sleepout.
What goes wrong
The failures here are predictable, and almost none of them are about joinery.
- **Freezing the whole property.** The single most expensive outcome. Four years of a swollen benchtop and a door that won't shut, because the sleepout is unresolved and the owner has decided everything is contaminated by it. The kitchen was never blocked.
- **The microwave defence.** Someone reads that a food preparation facility "includes all of the following" and reasons that a bar fridge and a jug and no oven therefore isn't one. Maybe. That is an argument to have with a planner before you spend money, not with a council officer afterwards — and "means for cooking food" is doing more work in that sentence than people want it to.
- **Installing over the evidence.** New cabinetry lined across the exact wall a council inspector needed opened. The CoA gets qualified, the value of it drops, and the cabinetry comes back out at the owner's cost.
- **Assuming the 2026 exemption is an amnesty.** It's a new-build pathway. It does not reach an existing garage or sleepout, and building it out before checking that has become a genuinely common mistake this year.
- **Renting the sleepout out anyway.** Once it's tenanted you've added a whole second body of obligation on top of the consent problem, and the Healthy Homes standards reach the kitchen as well — ventilation and extraction being the touchpoint.
- **Treating a discretionary exemption as automatic.** Councils can grant one. "Can" is not "will", and you don't order cabinetry on the strength of a phone call.
- **Losing the certificates.** The electrical certificate of compliance for the new kitchen circuits is the paper trail that proves the one bit of your kitchen job that had a regulatory hook. It goes in the property folder the day you get it, not into a drawer.
What to ask before you sign
- Is my kitchen genuinely like-for-like — comparable components, same positions — or am I moving the sink and telling myself it isn't a move?
- Does any part of the new kitchen sit in, on, or against the unconsented structure? If yes, you have collision one or collision two, and the sequence changes.
- Would the install conceal anything a council inspector would want to see for a certificate of acceptance?
- Was the unconsented work done on or after 1 July 1992? Before that, the CoA route isn't available.
- Have I ordered the full property file, not just the LIM? The LIM only holds what the council knows about.
- Who is issuing the certificate of compliance for the new fixed wiring, and who is the registered plumber or drainlayer for anything at the sink?
- Is my kitchen supplier quoting supply and install as one contract, or am I about to co-ordinate three trades myself on a property that already has a paperwork problem?
Frequently asked questions
Can I renovate my kitchen if there's unconsented work somewhere else on the property?
In almost all cases yes. A like-for-like kitchen replacement using comparable components in the same position usually sits inside the Schedule 1 exemption of the Building Act 2004 and needs no building consent, so there's no application for anyone to hold up. An unresolved requisition on the LIM relates to the other structure and doesn't attach itself to your cabinetry. The exceptions are where the kitchen is going into the unconsented building itself, or where the install would conceal work a council inspector needs to see.
Does applying for a building consent for my kitchen expose the unconsented sleepout?
Most like-for-like kitchens don't need a consent at all, so the question often doesn't arise. If your job does need one — you're moving plumbing, taking out a wall, changing the layout — then you're inviting a council officer onto the property and onto the file. That's not a reason to skip consent, which is never the right call, but it is a reason to know exactly what's on the property file first and to talk to your LBP about the sequence. Guessing is what turns a manageable problem into an enforcement one.
Can I put a kitchenette in an unconsented sleepout for family?
Not as a kitchen job. Under the Auckland Unitary Plan a dwelling is living accommodation served by a food preparation facility/kitchen, and that facility is defined to include cooking, food rinsing, utensil washing, waste water disposal, prep space and refrigerated food storage. Installing one converts an accessory building into a dwelling, which is a planning question and probably a building one too, in a structure that has no consent to begin with. Start with a planner, not a joiner.
The sleepout was built before 1992 — can I still get a certificate of acceptance?
No. A certificate of acceptance is only available for building work carried out without a consent from 1 July 1992 onwards. For genuinely older work the CoA route is closed, and what the council will accept as evidence of its status varies with the property and its history. That's a direct conversation with Auckland Council rather than something to assume either way, and it's worth having before you commit to a renovation programme around it.
Will a certificate of acceptance make the sleepout the same as a consented building?
No, and it's important not to sell yourself that story. Auckland Council states plainly that a CoA doesn't have the same value as an approved building consent, and that issuing one doesn't limit its ability to take enforcement action, though it will take the CoA into account. Its practical worth also depends on how much the council could physically inspect — the certificate is qualified to the elements they could see. It resolves the requisition on the LIM, which is real value, but a buyer's lawyer will still read it for what it is.
Get the kitchen moving
Twenty-three years and more than two thousand kitchens in, the pattern out west is familiar enough to call early. Send us the address, a rough scope and a couple of photos of the existing run — you don't need drawings, and you certainly don't need the sleepout resolved first. We'll tell you straight whether what you're describing is a like-for-like swap or something that's quietly crossed into consent territory, and you'll have a trade-priced number back inside 24 hours. If you want a sense of the bands before you talk to anyone, the current Auckland picture is a reasonable place to calibrate.
It's supply and install under one contract and one invoice, made in our own workshop in East Tamaki, on site five to seven days. No showroom, so no showroom margin — the same maths that makes portfolio kitchen upgrades around Henderson stack up applies to a single Ranui three-bedroom. And if you are letting the place, spec a ducted rangehood rather than a recirculating one while the walls are open — it's the cheapest decision on the job and the one most likely to be checked. Do the kitchen. Run the paperwork on its own track. They were never the same job.