What order does second fix happen in?

On our build the sequence was boarding and fire board, then insulation and underfloor heating, then the screed pour, then plastering, then the mist coat, then the kitchen units, then flooring and second fix electrics. Each step is gated by the one before it drying or being level, which is why the order matters more than the calendar.

What should I do if kitchen units arrive damaged or wrong?

Open and check every box the day the kitchen lands, not the day the fitter arrives. We left ours sealed for nearly three months and only found the wrong shelves, missing lights and a wrong base unit when fitting started, which pushed the credit note and the replacement order into the new year.

How long do you have to leave plaster before decorating?

Longer than you think in winter. Fresh screed and fresh plaster together put a lot of water into the room, and our painter could not put a mist coat on the utility room walls until the dehumidifier had been running continuously for days.

Does screed depth matter for underfloor heating?

It changes how the heating behaves rather than whether the floor is safe. Our specification called for 75mm and 65mm of flowing screed actually went down, which means less thermal mass and a floor that warms and cools faster than the design assumed.

Second Fix: Screed, Plaster and a Kitchen Fitted in December

The roof was on and the walls were up by the middle of October 2022, though a leak above one roof window would nag at us into December. It took another three months, nearly all of them cold, before anybody could cook in the room. Second fix is where a building stops being a structure and starts being a house, and it is also where the sequencing gets unforgiving, because almost every job is waiting on something else to be flat, dry or finished.

Boarding, and the fire board around the steels

Plasterboard started going up in October. The pink boards in this photo are fire board, which went on the blockwork beside the steel where the extension meets the back of the original house. Steel loses strength quickly in a fire, so it gets encased.

Angled plasterboard ceiling partly installed with green vapour barrier behind, and pink fire-rated board fixed to a blockwork wall beside a steel — 11 October 2022. Plasterboard going into place, with fire board added beside the steel at the rear of the house.

The builder invoiced this in two chunks, £680 and then £730, each covering boarding labour plus the extractor ducting he was running at the same time. Small numbers next to what came later. They are also a good example of how a final account gets hard to check, because labour and materials for two different jobs arrived on one line.

The screed: an allowance, not a price

On 14 November I rang round screeding companies, because the floor was the next thing due and I wanted to know what it cost. That was when I learned the builder had allowed about £1,300 for the screed in his original quote. An allowance is a placeholder. It is not a price, and the gap between the two is yours to fund.

The best number came from a firm in Bampton. The builder preferred MPA, his own supplier, so rather than fight about it I agreed to pay the difference direct. MPA quoted £2,185 plus VAT for 80m² of cementitious flowing screed at 65mm, £2,622 all in, payable 48 hours before the lorry arrived. It went down on 25 November. A fortnight later £61.80 came back as a credit, because five cubic metres were used against the 5.2 estimated. Net cost £2,560.20.

Warning

Ask your builder which lines in his quote are allowances rather than priced work. Specialist subcontracted items like screed, tiling and steel fabrication are the usual candidates. Price those separately before you sign, and agree in writing who picks the subcontractor if you are the one funding the gap.

There is a second thing about that screed that I did not spot until months later, when I put the invoice next to the drawing.

65mm

The depth of flowing screed that actually went down, against a specification that called for 75mm of sand and cement. Nobody raised it on site or at building control. Ten millimetres will not hurt the structure, but a thinner screed holds less heat, so the underfloor heating warms and cools the room faster than the design assumed.

A pour is a fixed date with a lorry attached, and everything upstream of it compresses towards that date instead of the date moving. Insulation was delivered and laid on 22 November, rushed, with me insisting extra sand went underneath to support some areas. The plumber laid the underfloor heating on 24 November, the day before the pour, and he was not happy about how little time he had been given. The person doing the last job before a pour absorbs every delay that came before them.

Tip

If your flowing screed does not quite reach the edges of the room, that is normal. It is plastic contraction under the screed's own weight as it settles. I queried it with the supplier and was told to fill the gaps with any flexible filler before the floor finish goes down.

Plaster, and a house full of water

The apex end of the kitchen was plastered first, in an earlier session in mid-November, with the tall glazing already in and the steels holding up the rear corner of the old house behind it. The main first-pass campaign across the kitchen and utility ran from the end of November into early December.

Freshly plastered apex wall at the end of a vaulted kitchen with full-height glazing installed and exposed steelwork at the rear corner — 10 November 2022. The kitchen roof apex plastered, glazing in, and the steels carrying the rear corner of the original house.

The plasterer ran short of material on the first pass and had to come back on 6 December to finish. Agree quantities before anyone starts. Nobody wants a second visit scheduled around a shortfall.

Small utility room with freshly applied wet plaster on every wall, a window in place, and an underfloor heating manifold mounted low on the left-hand wall — 7 December 2022. Utility room freshly plastered with the underfloor heating manifold in place. The walls are still visibly wet.

Between the screed and the plaster the room was carrying an enormous amount of water. A dehumidifier ran continuously through December and the mist coat still had to wait. Our painter came to do the utility room and found the walls too wet to take paint. Winter builds need a drying plan, with a dehumidifier and a heater budgeted as part of the programme rather than borrowed in a panic, because painting and flooring simply cannot start until the moisture drops.

Large open-plan room with freshly plastered walls and ceiling carrying a thin white first coat of paint, bare screed floor covered in dust and footprints, with a dehumidifier, a ladder and planks standing about — 5 December 2022. Mist coat going on to fresh plaster in the kitchen, with the dehumidifier running against the moisture still coming out of the screed.

Setting out lights before the kitchen existed

On 8 December the electrician hung the big dome pendants. The island they were meant to sit above did not exist yet, so he set a green laser line across the ceiling and worked to that.

Large dark dome pendant hanging from a chain in an unfinished room, with a green laser line projected across the ceiling and circular openings for further lights — 8 December 2022. Pendant lights hung against a green laser line used to set their positions before the island was built.

That only works because the island position had been fixed on paper months earlier, at first fix, when the cables went in. Change your kitchen layout after first fix and you are chasing walls.

December: fitting a kitchen with a heater on the floor

The units had been in boxes since 23 September, when the balance of £16,625.03 was paid before the supplier would put them on a lorry. Three payments in total across the year, £33,250.07 for the cabinetry, supply only, no fitting.

The fitter started on 12 December. It was properly cold by then, so we put a space heater on the floor and ran it through the working day, partly so he could work and partly so the adhesives and sealants behaved.

Newly installed dark floor-to-ceiling kitchen cabinets along a back wall with a large island carcass in the centre, surrounded by packaging and tools on a bare floor — 13 December 2022. Installation in progress, with the tall floor-to-ceiling units in place and the corner shelf unit and drawers going in.

On 15 December, with the boxes finally open, the defect list appeared. Pocket shelves the wrong thickness. Missing shelf lights. A wrong base unit. Missing hardware. A handle fitted upside down. No back panel for the sink unit. Every one of those faults had been sitting in the garage since September.

5 weeks

The gap between finding the kitchen delivery defects on 15 December and the supplier issuing the credit note on 20 January. The replacement parts did not arrive until February, well after we had started using the room.

Warning

Unbox and check every kitchen cabinet on the day it is delivered, against the order, item by item. Not when the fitter arrives. We lost nearly three months of resolution time by leaving sealed boxes in a garage, and a credit note plus a replacement order takes weeks, not days, even once you have started it.

The breakfast bar we redesigned on site

We had designed the breakfast bar to run perpendicular to the island. On paper it looked right. Standing in the room with the carcasses in place, it clearly projected too far into the walkway, and we had quietly suspected as much for months without doing anything about it.

So we cut it on site. Over 13 and 14 December we tried several configurations with the fitter, explained what we wanted, and he worked out a way to fix it that was both strong and the shape we had been arguing for. It is the one significant design change we made after the units arrived, and it worked because the fitter was willing to think rather than just assemble. On 20 December I sat at it with a beer, in its final fixed position, while the rest of the room was still a building site.

Island carcass with a temporary plywood top, seen from across the room under newly installed recessed downlights and pendant fittings with some wiring still exposed — 15 December 2022. The island carcass in place under the lights the electrician had just installed.

Main run of dark kitchen cabinetry with wall units installed above and tall carcasses housing an integrated fridge freezer at one end and a wine fridge at the other — 16 December 2022. The main run in, with the fridge freezer already sitting in its carcass and the wine fridge housing at the far end.

By 20 December the hob was fitted and ducted through to the vent on the far wall, and both ovens were in.

Worktops, tiles and a floor in January

Worktops cannot be templated until the units are in and level, which is why they always land at the end. Templates were taken in January and the tops were fitted on the 16th and 17th. They were paid in three parts: £1,000 on a credit card on 10 January, £4,000 the next day, and the balance of £5,052.48 on 31 January. £10,052.48 including VAT.

The floor went down first. This green layer is the preparation coat before tiling, and the tiles were laid around and up to the units rather than underneath them.

Open-plan kitchen and dining room with a bright green floor preparation layer applied across the whole floor, island and dining furniture in place under a large skylight — 4 January 2023. Preparation layer down across the floor, ready for tiling.

We chose the tiles at Minoli in Oxford and ordered them on the tiler's trade account with his discount applied: 227 tiles covering 81m² for £3,933.46. He quoted £3,100 on 15 December for the matting, the tiling and the grout, and invoiced exactly £3,100 on 10 January. He was the only trade on the entire job whose invoice matched his quote to the penny, and the work was excellent.

Newly laid light grey floor tiles across a kitchen with pale walls, a sloped ceiling, a large skylight and black pendant lights above a dark island — 5 January 2023. The floor tiled, using tiles bought from Minoli in Oxford.

Decorating happened around all of this, in gaps, whenever the walls were dry enough and the room was empty enough. The painter was paid £947.50, then £900, then a final £340 in the middle of January.

The finished room

Completed open-plan living and dining space with grey tiled floor, dark furniture and pendant lighting, lit by a large roof window and bifold doors onto the garden — 24 January 2023. The roof windows doing what they were bought to do.

The roof windows are the thing visitors comment on. My one regret is that they sit slightly lower in the roof than I would now choose, because a little more height would have let the lead tuck under with far more certainty.

Finished open-plan kitchen with dark grey cabinetry, a large island with a wooden breakfast bar, grey tiled floor, multiple skylights, dining table and bench seating — 24 January 2023. The whole space: the old kitchen, the side extension and the rear extension, with light coming in from every direction.

Three months separated the boarded shell and this room. The screed was the expensive surprise, the kitchen delivery was the avoidable one, and the winter stretched everything else. If you get one decision right in this phase, make it checking the kitchen the day it arrives.

Working through your own second fix? The second fix phase guides cover plastering, screeding, tiling, decoration and the kitchen install as sequenced tasks, with the dependencies and the drying times spelled out.

Second Fix