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Island Driveways & Patios, Inc

Outdoor Kitchens

Transform your backyard with a custom outdoor kitchen. Perfect for cooking and entertaining, designed to suit your style.

Outdoor Kitchen Construction in Islip, NY

From a built-in grill surround to a full cook line with counters, storage, refrigeration and a sink. Built in non-combustible framing across Islip, faced to match your hardscaping, with the utilities planned before anything is enclosed.

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The ground under Islip

Islip is south-shore outwash: sand and gravel washed out from the moraines to the north and laid down flat. Level ground, free-draining subgrade, easy excavation: on paper the most straightforward material we work on. Streets closer to the water sit on a higher water table, which limits how deep you can excavate before working wet.

For an outdoor kitchen, the ground question is whether the base under the structure can carry it without settling. Free-draining sand is good ground provided it’s properly compacted: an outdoor kitchen is a concentrated load, and differential settlement under a run of masonry cracks it.

How we do the work

The utilities decide everything, so decide them first. An outdoor kitchen is a masonry job wrapped around a services job. Once the carcass is built and faced, adding a gas line or a water run means opening it back up.

Gas needs a line correctly sized for the appliance load, or a propane tank with somewhere accessible and ventilated to live. Electric needs outdoor circuits with GFCI protection, and enough of them: under-counter refrigeration in particular wants a dedicated supply and ventilation. A sink needs supply, drainage, and a way to be isolated and blown down before winter; a line that can’t be drained will split in the first hard freeze.

The carcass is steel stud and cement board, or block. Not timber. This is an enclosure around an appliance that produces serious heat, and every built-in grill has a required clearance envelope and required ventilation openings. Skip them and you have a void warranty and a genuine fire risk. It’s the part nobody sees and everybody should ask about.

Countertops have to survive freeze-thaw, UV and things being put down hot. Several materials sold for outdoor use don’t manage all three here.

What moves the price in Islip

Drainage design is what varies here. On flat ground water doesn’t run off on its own. It goes where the pitch sends it, and getting consistent fall across a large area is a set-out job done before anything is laid. On a slope you can be sloppy about that and get away with it; on Islip’s flat lots you cannot. Parts of the south shore also sit in mapped flood zones, where added hard surface becomes a regulatory question rather than a design preference.

Local rules

Islip is in the Town of Islip: the hamlet and the town share a name, which occasionally confuses paperwork but does make the answer simple. Unincorporated, so the town office.

What we’ll do regardless: tell you what applies before you sign, not after we’ve started.

Why this crew

The person who quotes the job is on the crew that runs it, and the quote states the base depth, which is the line worth comparing across any estimates you’re holding.

ICPI certified, Techo-Bloc Pro, A+ with the BBB, trading since 2017, working out of a yard on Horseblock Road in Medford.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use my existing grill?
A freestanding grill isn’t designed to be built into an enclosure. The clearances and ventilation are different. Built-in units exist for this. We can design around a freestanding grill with counters either side instead.

Will it survive the winter?
The masonry and a properly specified countertop will. Anything holding water has to be drained down. We’ll show you what to do and when. It’s a ten-minute job once a year.

Will more hard surface make my drainage worse?
It can. Every square foot of hard surface is a square foot that no longer absorbs water, and on flat south-shore lots that water has to be given somewhere to go. It’s a design question, not a reason not to build.