Journal
What we have learned, written down
Everything here is something a client asked that took more than a phone call to answer properly. No sales copy, and nothing you have to give us an email address to read.
What a kitchen actually costs in Accra, line by line
Nearly every kitchen quote a homeowner shows us is wrong in the same two places. The units are priced carefully and the things around the units — the plumbing move, the tiling, the electrical alterations, the making good — are a round number somebody put at the bottom.
On a typical GH₵ 40,000 kitchen the cabinets and worktop are about half. Appliances are a fifth if you are sensible about it. The remaining third is labour, and that third is what decides whether the doors line up in year three.
The two lines people underestimate are the plumbing move and the electrics. Moving a sink more than a metre means a new waste run under the floor, and any kitchen built before 2010 will want more sockets than it has. Neither is expensive on its own. Both are expensive to add after the tiling is on.
Also on the shelf
Two more worth ten minutes
Rewiring an older house: what is behind the wall
Houses in Accra built before the mid-nineties were mostly wired in aluminium, and aluminium creeps. Every screwed connection in the house loosens slowly over thirty years, which is why sockets get warm and lights flicker in the same one room.
The second thing we find is buried joints — a cable that has been cut and reconnected inside the wall with no accessible box. It is not illegal so much as unfindable, and it is the reason a fault that should take an hour to trace takes a day.
A full rewire on a three-bedroom takes about a fortnight and makes more mess than anything else we do, because every wall gets chased. It is worth doing in the same month as the plastering and never worth doing on its own.
Six questions to ask any builder before you sign
Ask who will be on site every day, by name. If the answer is a company rather than a person, the honest translation is that nobody in particular is responsible for your job.
Ask what happens if the job runs late, and listen for whether there is a mechanism or an apology. Ask what is excluded from the price — a quote with no exclusions list has simply not been thought about.
Ask to see a job that finished two years ago rather than two months ago. Anybody can show you a house the week the paint went on. The interesting question is what the grout looks like after two rainy seasons.
Start here
A survey costs nothing and takes an hour
Tell us the address and what is bothering you. Somebody will come and look, and you will have a written price within four working days.
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024 411 9082