Sunita and her husband moved into their Sector 7 flat almost six years ago, and the kitchen hadn’t been touched since. It was a straight single-wall layout — barely 6.5 feet wide — with the gas stove crammed next to the sink and one overhead shelf that had started sagging in the middle.
Her main complaint wasn’t really about looks. She works a 9-to-6 job and does most of her cooking between 7 and 8 in the morning. In that old kitchen, there was nowhere to keep the tiffin boxes, the mixer sat on the counter permanently because there was no space to store it, and she’d bang her elbow on the fridge door almost every day because it opened right into the walking path.
What we changed
The layout stayed straight — there wasn’t room for anything else — but we reworked the storage completely. The gas stove moved 18 inches to the left to clear elbow room near the sink, and we added a tall pull-out unit exactly where the old sagging shelf was, sized to fit her existing tiffin boxes and spice jars without her having to reorganise everything into new containers.
We used a laminate finish in a warm oak tone for the base cabinets and a plain white acrylic on top — she wanted something that wouldn’t show fingerprints near the stove but didn’t want the kitchen to feel dark given how little natural light comes in from that side of the flat.
The one hiccup
Mid-installation, we realised the existing electrical point for the chimney was on the wrong wall — a leftover from when the flat was originally wired. Rerouting it added four extra days to the timeline, which we hadn’t accounted for in the original quote. We ended up absorbing the cost since it was our measurement team’s miss during the site visit, not something we could pass on to her.
Result
Total time from final measurement to handover was 19 days. The mixer now lives inside a pull-out shelf instead of on the counter, and — her words, not ours — “I can finally open the fridge without hitting my elbow.”
- Materials used: Oak laminate (base), white acrylic (overhead), BWP-grade waterproof ply
- Timeline: 19 days (including 4-day electrical rework)
- Budget: ₹2.4 Lakh