How to phase a kitchen and flooring job

It's one of the first questions people ask us when they're doing a kitchen and the floor at the same time: does the flooring go down first, or do the units? Get the order right and the job runs clean and on time. Get it wrong and you're either fitting units onto a floor that's about to get damaged, or paying to floor under cupboards nobody will ever see. Here's how we sequence it, and why.

The short answer: it depends on the floor

There isn't one rule, because it hinges on what your floor is. Tile and most "wet" floors behave differently to laid floors like LVT or engineered wood, and a floating floor behaves differently again. So the real skill isn't a fixed order — it's matching the sequence to the floor you've chosen, which is something to settle at the quote stage, not halfway through.

Tell us the floor you're set on early and the whole plan falls into place around it. Leave it undecided and the sequence has to stay vague too, which is where jobs drift.

The real skill isn't a fixed order — it's matching the sequence to the floor you've chosen, settled at the quote stage rather than halfway through.

Why the units usually go in first

For most kitchens, the carcasses go in before the final floor. There's good reason for it: units want to sit on a level, solid base, and the last thing you want is your brand-new floor taking a beating from trolleys, tools and dropped offcuts during the messiest week of the job. Flooring up to the units — rather than wall-to-wall under them — also avoids paying to cover space that's permanently hidden, and it means a future appliance swap doesn't leave you with a gap where the floor never went.

There are exceptions, which is the whole point of planning it: a continuous floor you want running unbroken under everything, or a particular floating floor, can change the call. That's a decision to make deliberately, with the reasons clear, not by default.

Where tiling and worktops fit

Tiled floors often want laying earlier in the run, because they need time to set and they're the messy, dusty part you don't want happening around finished units. Worktops are the opposite end — stone and solid tops get templated only once the units are set and locked in, then fitted a few days later, with splashbacks and tiling following. Slotting those two around each other is most of what "phasing" actually means.

It's also where a job can stall if it's not thought through: a worktop templated too early to an unfinished run, or floor tiles going down with no time to cure, are the kind of small sequencing mistakes that cost days.

The dust-and-disruption factor

Sequencing isn't only about the floor lasting — it's about you living around the work. We protect the route in and the floor early, keep the dirty trades grouped so the mess happens in one stretch rather than dragging on, and leave the clean finishing work to the end. Done in the right order, the disruptive part is short and predictable instead of spread across the whole job.

In a house where the kitchen is the only way through to the back, that planning matters even more — we'll tell you which days are the dusty ones so you can be out of the way if you'd rather.

Get the sequence in your quote

The best time to sort all this is before anything's ripped out. When we quote a kitchen-and-floor job we'll talk through the order of works for your specific floor, so you know what's happening which week and when the room's out of action. If you want to see how a full fit runs start to finish, the kitchens page lays out the week-by-week shape of it, and a recent Blackburn kitchen refurbishment shows the finished result. When you're ready, tell us about your project and we'll plan the sequence with you.