You need to get drawings approved by your local division of inspection. They may want stamped drawings or they may accept scribbling on the back of a napkin. Find a reputable contractor and see what he recommends. The electrical sounds about right.

Thx Joseph. I'll ask my GC if they could do the drawings. They are the ones who informed me an architect is required. I'm not quite sure why.

I wonder if you could use a draftsperson rather than an architect.

The estimate for 240V/50A service actually sounds low unless the breaker panel is adjacent to the kitchen. How are they going to get the wire from the panel to the kitchen since you are on a slab foundation?

Stan, it's on opposite side of house. They will get back to me about it and are looking into it is what the email said. What are they doing for yours? Or are you already set up for electrical there?

That's one area we got lucky on. The breaker panel is 8 feet from the kitchen along the side of the garage. They are going to run conduit from the panel to the kitchen wall. Also the breaker panel has two unused 50A circuits put in for a pool and a spa that were never added so we'll be able to use those for the cooktop and steam oven. Still, labor costs in Southern California during a boom cycle are crazy.

Our service panel was upgraded last year when we added solar. I'm hoping we have extra capacity. We would have to run conduit from one end of the house to the exact opposite end (diagonally). That can't be cheap. Maybe the contractor doesn't realize where my panel is located. Boo for me, maybe I'll stick to gas

That's high for permits and plans. We're in Southern California and used a Newport Beach architect to draw up plans to extend our roof line so that we could replace a 15 ft bay window with a picture window. That ran about $800. Now we are working on pushing out a wall that has a load bearing beam running through it, and removing a load bearing post in our kitchen. The quote for that just came in yesterday at $1000-$1400.

Stan is the same required for the steam oven? Please tell me no. I can't give that up!

Lonepalm, that's the kinda news I wanted to hear! We will already have the kitchen drawings from the kitchen designer so I don't see why it would be so much more.

Newport Beach is about 80 miles from me.

I think our 50A circuit was around $500, although we had to update all of the electrical (not on slab thankfully though). If they made it work with our 125A service I'm sure you will be fine! We had an architect do drawings because we thought we were going to use a different contracted at first that required this - ran us $500 although he had done drawings for a house with identical layout prior so I actually thought it was going to be cheaper! He just charged an hourly rate. Ended up we probably didn't need to do it at all, but there you have it. I know other people have just used their cabinet makers drawings for the permit but I imagine this depends very much on where you live.

That's what I thought. Why can't I just use the kitchen designer drawings and pay an architect an hourly rate to do drawings for the moving of the wall and the addition of windows? He/she wouldn't be designing the kitchen layout, that is already done by KD. Why reinvent the wheel?

Make sure that the architect fees also cover the engineering cost. In LA County when I wanted to add a window, I was required to have an engineering calculation of the load on the wall to determine the size of the new header beam. The architect does not do that calculation. Only an engineering firm does. The engineering calculation was $500. Because this was not a significant change, I could do the type of drawing that the county needed for the permit.

Thanks yes it includes engineering cost.

did you do your own drawings?

"Why can't I just use the kitchen designer drawings and pay an architect an hourly rate to do drawings for the moving of the wall and the addition of windows?"

You may be able to but most architects won't work with someone else's plans and stamp them as the they own the whole magilla.

It's a 50 amp circuit for my induction for my build, which seems to be pretty standard these days -- the cheap coil electric range I just put into my current home for resale is 50 amp, too.

Then again, I simply got a four-burner induction -- maybe you have a lot more bells and whistles on yours?

I would think all ranges would have their own dedicated circuit??

I wouldn't expect the architect to stamp my KD drawings. But I can hire architect for only the structural aspects and submit the drawings from KD separately.

Spoke to the contractor today and they will see what they can do about using their own drawings and what the county requires. Our home falls outside the city limits so I'm hoping the county isn't as picky as the city. The range they gave was worst case scenario based on other more extensive projects. They won't know until their architect/engineer returns from vacation and they will be able to squeeze my small project in. Otherwise finding my own during this busy time will be tough.

For the induction, they will likely need to run the wire up through garage, up to spare bedroom, through attic, across second floor then down through master bath to get to kitchen. That's a lot of wiring!

Another thing I found is that architects are priced higher....they deal with both structure and a lot of aesthetics. They tend to be more artsy. If you're just doing the guts of a project, a structural engineer might be a better fit for your project and should be priced low NOT because the quality is less, but because they hold the title of structural engineer and not architect. It's a grey area, sometimes it's used interchangeably, other times one will pitch a fit if you use the wrong term for what they do!

I upgraded to 50amp circuit and new wiring for induction for $500

in the midwest - $600 to run wiring for a 50 amp about 75 feet - had to work a bit to get it from the basement on one side of the house to the first floor kitchen on the other side of the house because the basement is finished.