Hi, we’re looking at renovating our kitchen

I had a friend who used a renovations company, I think it was Refresh renovations. I believe they arranged everything i.e. plans, permits, material and labour and she said that they were quick, honest and went above and beyond in a crisis. Of course there was a crisis. When they removed the front windows the house threatened to collapse so that had to be fixed. She was fortunate in that she had funding for a bathroom renovation as well, and it hadn’t started, so she did get to finish within budget just not within scope. It depends on many things the age of the house being one. I also wouldn’t take an off the cuff recommendation here without doing some thorough checking – which is difficult – no company is going to give you the phone number of an unhappy client. I would say that unless your budget is unlimited I would steer away from using a registered architect. This results in an odd situation where you sign one contract with the architect and a separate one with the builder. But the architect signs off the builders invoices. I won’t elaborate here about how badly that situation can go wrong except to say if the architect is NZRAB registered talk to a construction contracts lawyer at partner level before signing anything.