If you are going to refurbish your kitchen in Welwyn there are a number of different things that you can do, which will depend largely on your budget. If you really want to take it by the scruff of the neck and rip everything out and start again, you can quite easily go through £25,000 or more, and not everyone has that kind of money.

You might even want to extend your kitchen. In today’s world, more and more people entertain friends and family in the kitchen for dinner, and they may stay there for an hour or two afterwards having the proverbial coffees and brandies and nattering about this and that. And why not?

The problem is that many kitchens in older homes are simply not big enough to accommodate everything that you want to do, so the answer would be to build an extension. Obviously, that is going to cost money, but it could be a great answer if that is your lifestyle.

Even if you don’t want/need to extend, if you tear everything out and start from square one, it can still cost a lot. You might want to build an island – either to use as a dining table, or perhaps for installing the cooker and sink. If you are moving everything around, you have to change all the plumbing too, which will add to the cost.

However, there are a lot of things that you can do in a kitchen that don’t involve ripping everything out, yet still give you a complete transformation. For instance, if all your appliances are in good working order, you don’t need to change them for the sake of it. But you might choose to hide them. Our fridges, washing machines, freezers, and so on, all come in a glorious shade of white, which is not exactly an aesthetic.

What you can do is to hide them behind doors to make them appear as cabinets. So you could install new cabinets – wall and floor cabinets – and have matching doors made to cover the appliances. When you want to get at the fridge you simply open the “cabinet” door and there is your fridge. But it gives you a completely new appearance to your kitchen. If your existing cabinets are OK, you could just have doors made in the same material – wood for instance – to cover the appliances without installing new cabinets. Everything matches.

Two things that make a huge difference to the appearance of a kitchen are the floor and the worktops. They take up quite a lot of space and by changing them it can make a dramatic difference. For instance, you might want to create a marble floor. That is not going to be cheap but will last forever. Well, perhaps not quite forever, but you know what we mean.

If you don’t want/don’t need to change the floor, changing the worktops can also have a stunning impact. At Marble & Granite we obviously supply marble and granite worktops and backsplashes, but we also produce them from other stones too.

Many people today like quartz, and it has many benefits. Quartz worktops in Welwyn are man-made stone and are created from natural quartz aggregates that are ground down and mixed with resins and pigments. This produces a worktop that looks exactly like real stone (because most of it is) but has properties that natural stone does not.

To begin with, quartz worktops are completely non-porous. That has two major benefits in the kitchen, one of which is that they cannot possibly harbour any bacteria and are therefore ideal for food preparation. Second, they cannot absorb stains as many natural stones do, which is also a consideration when you are working with foods and liquids that can seep into them. This means that they do not need sealing, as stones like marble and granite do.

Quartz worktops come in a variety of different colors and styles, and from major manufacturers such as Caesarstone and Unistone. They are also scratch-resistant, easy to clean, and will very probably outlive your kitchen – even after it needs another makeover in 30 years’ time.