Has anyone made there own kitchen?

Well there are companies out there that will make you ply cabs for your kitchen so I can't see there being a regulation reason for not doing it.

Will need careful integration into the rest of your decor to not look crap mind but in the right place it works well

My dad did his own kitchen, entirely from scratch - including the worktops, which he made of out glass and concrete. It’s still going strong after ten years.

Considering your training in design, I can’t image you’ll have any trouble.

Not that my word counts for much, but I think you should go for it. Just get an electrician and a gas person in to do the bits that need regulating, and it’ll be fine.

I used one of these to make all of the doors. You will need to buy, borrow or make a router table. Very easy to do as you can make the carcasses to fit the space and the doors exactly the size you need.

https://www.axminstertools.com/axcaliber-stile-and-rail-cutter-shaker-951288?glCountry=GB&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA_aGuBhACEiwAly57MUu_ttNDF4dce2OpFnpUN6hQgykWk4RyCcF1DvBfvbYpGSxKu49SORoC3K4QAvD_BwE

entirely from scratch

OP's username checks out.

I suspect the wood will set you back quite a bit. I'd be tempted to find some decent 2nd hand units and use you skills to make them fit. People rip out perfectly good kitchens just because they want a change

Saying that since my degree in 2003 I've never worked with wood! I've always been injection moulding focussed, I'm well aware there's some very handy wood workers/joiners on here

I suspect the wood will set you back quite a bit. I’d be tempted to find some decent 2nd hand units and use you skills to make them fit. People rip out perfectly good kitchens just because they want a change

My mate actually vinyl wrapped the doors of his kitchen units to modernise his kitchen.

The wood will have a cost but I think if I stripped out the appliances IKEA was still £2k for units so gives me room to play, I'll double check later.

I've been keeping my eye out for old cabs, I have some now which are battered to much just to screw new doors on, al the second hand ones are tiny or ancient, I'm looking at two two straight runs about 3.5m in length

Where did you do your degree out of interest? Bucks?

I suppose it comes down to what you are richest in. Time, or cash?

If time, then yeah, do it yourself.
If not, then buy units in.

Finding used ones falls somewhere in the middle and would be what I might try to do if I needed to.

Making kitchen carcasses isn't very glamorous really. There are companies that bash them out with cnc machines.

There must be endless opportunity to pick up perfectly good kitchens that are ripped out for changing fashion. Terrible really.

The carcasses are just boxes that you barely see so you can concentrate on the doors and the details to give it a bit of flair.

Is DIY kitchens way out of budget for the carcasses?

I did this many years ago and am thinking of doing it again. 12mm ply carcasses and shelves painted internally for wipeability. I made a pine framework for the fronts to set the doors into, kind of gave the impression they were solid wood units.

12mm seems a bit measly for carcasses to me, plus you start getting issues screwing things to it and fittings that have minimum thickness requirements etc.

18mm is standard.

I’d be seriously surprised if you can’t buy units for less than the cost of trying to make them.  I fit them for a living and I couldn’t be bothered to try and make mine once I’d priced up materials and worked out how much time would be required, especially in the finishing of everything.

If you’ve got a big table saw or CNC and a large flat area for building in, you might stand a chance.  You’d want 18 or 16mm carcass sides really as that’s what most std kitchen ironmongery is designed to fit.

check out Scottbrowncarpentry on YouTube.  He’s a Kiwi buider/chippy who happens to have just built and fitted his own kitchen.  He’s very time rich and cash poor.

Mine is IKEA with custom oak details. The units are pretty cheap with a long warranty. Bit of oak section to detail it and it looks good without costing much.

Secondhand granite is cheap if you can work it and move it.

Ok, so potential mileage here, ill have a good look at a cost comparison before starting, thanks BS thought you were in that line of work.

The kitchen is around 16s/m space in total so I've got plenty of room on the one side for making stuff, I've got an router too 'for one day' I've not used it yet!

The old cabs are chipboard inners which stand directly on the deck, I think all the 'feet' have all blown from water ingress over the years

Devils in the detail, I'll cost for 18mm outers, in my mind a clean ply edge would look ok if a cut and finished well, it's planning for the wear and tear not having a wrapped finish will give me, my DIY level is ok but still at the stage of finding out how to do a job while doing it and then actually knowing on the secon attempt..

Degree was DMU at Leicester back 99-03, they ran a good course back then but the head guy retired and the other two jumped to Notts Trent after I left, it's not what it was.

We did our kitchen on a budget by mostly using standalone secondhand items. Only built item was a sink unit with wine box drawers down the side plus some end plates that a carpenter friend then fitted a corian type wortktop over to also include dishwasher and fridge. Probably £500 for that lot plus white goods.

The rest is a larder cupboard (£200 secondhand), a chunky great sideboard (£80 secondhand) and a single cupboard to fit a space (£? bought new for a very specific gap).

£40 Smeg cooker was a bargain, but nightmare to repair the now failing bits without fully dismantling, which is why the spares are still in the box 🙄

All well under a grand anyway.

I'll chuck an induction hob in but seriously thinking of not bothering with a cooker, at least from the start, the air fryers doing everything at the moment.

Ill get a specific socket etc wired in for one though

Annoyingly im in a design management type role now as well, a copy of solid works or even 2D AutoCAD would be super handy, I've tried SketchUp but not listed more than 10 mins, back to drawing out sheet/cut sizes with pen and paper!

Sketchup is really pretty easy and has the advantage of gazillions of tutorials on YouTube.
Stick with it I'd say.
To be fair they've made the free version horrible. All online, not installed on your computer.

Unless your ply is Birch ply, the edges are usually not going to be that great. Lots of voids and generally not that attractive.

Birch ply though is really expensive and kind of sacrilege to make kitchen units out of it.

You just can't really compete with companies that have the buying power to get suitable materials down in price.

Another possibility if you want to make everything yourself but want the convenience and excellent finish you get with a specialist company is to use someone like Cutlist.

They have virtually every sheet material you can think of and they cut everything to the millimetre with edging applied if you want it, all according to a cutlist that you give them.

I've used them for a few bigger jobs and they are an excellent company.
The cost seems a lot at first, but then of course you have to remove the cost of the time taken to cut everything perfectly and edge it.

All you need to do then is joint and assemble.

Cutlist.co.uk

Might be worth pricing up the materials you want and figuring out the time it'll likely take you, and then getting a quote from Cutlist to compare.

I reckon you cant make units cheaper than ikea cabinets. I may be wrong but a plain ikea 60cm cabinet with no drawers is only about £30-£40? Obvs with drawers goes up.
i built my kitchen based on ikea cabinets everything else bespoke. I have product design degree from Brunel so v. Similar.
if u go ply route you will need b/bb birch throughout ply and thats at least £150 plus vat a sheet. Cheaper ply will chip and look crap.

Cost ikea base cabinets thoroughly. Wood is not so cheap anymore:(

just my 2p. Good luck

Thanks all, I was googling birch ply this afternoon, not the best time to be buying a key Russian export..

Was thinking if there's a way to kind of split the cabs in half front to back std ply at rear and birch on the seen edges and doors, but just work for the sake of it maybe, I'll strip all the appliances out of the IKEA model I've got running at the moment and see where it lands, cheaper no doubt!

I was chatting to a Swede the other week about this, he reckons a lot of people in South Sweden drive over to Poland and collects from the factory to reduce costs, im not sure my old Fabia would make Poland!

I had a builder working on my last place who was a bit good with a saw. I scanned the posh mags and then told him I wanted oak worktop, tulipwood doors, proper hinges, inch or so higher as I am, f and b french grey. It cost v little but helped sell the house handsomely. The cut outs made a hifi table and two oçcasionals.

I cobbled together our kitchen with a mixture of secondhand and new carcasses and made my own doors out of 18mm birch ply. As others have said I think you’d struggle to make carcasses cheaper than you can buy, but you can definitely save money making the doors yourself. These are the expensive bits!

ooooh gawd there is a lot of sanding and varnishing involved in getting ply looking good! Cutting is the easy bit. I wouldn’t go any lower than 18mm for doors cos you need a good thickness to fit the hinges and even 15mm is prone to warp. It’s a fun project though if you have the time!

The Litchborough kitchenettes at work are all birch ply including the doors and it looks smart.

It'll all need sealing or it'll warp

So, bog standard ply is fron China and the quality is shocking. For furniture there is birch ply but it's now in the £130 a sheet ballpark. There are cheaper alternatives like Perform ply. I have done a couple of kitchens for folk using Valchromat for the carcasses and doors which is a super high grade MDF in various colours, water resistance is good. Price 5 years ago was £110 a sheet though.

a copy of solid works or even 2D AutoCAD would be super handy

LibreCAD is quite a good 2D cad package for free. Not as fancy as AutoCAD but quite useable. NanoCAD is supposed to be quite AutoCAD like but I've not tried it. Also fusion360 is popular for 3D. There's quite a lot of free options out there.

///I need to install a full kitchen, sinks, cooker ////the lot. I’m on a tight budget.

I'd be looking towards IKEA, Howdens, DIY kitchens then. For instance IKEA has a 80 cm base unit with doors for 128 quid. For me to make that There's a sheet of 16 mm ply for the carcass (70 plus vat) some hinges (12 plus vat) a bit of oil to finish it. That's already put you at about that and you've got no doors to put on it, not paid for your labour, or any of the tools you've had to buy.

I've just made my own kitchen and it's dead nice but there's c2500 of materials gone into just making the cabinetry not including work tops appliances etc. and despite being (loosely) professional and setup for it it's taken for ever.

I bought DIY Kitchens for the units and the worktops. The units were all delivered fully built and I have had no concerns regarding quality.

I bought all the appliances from eBay on 20% off deals. Usually from AO as they didn't increase prices, and they offered reconditioned stuff.  I spent 6 months hoovering up bargains and the spare room was full with oven, fridge, induction hob, dishwasher, extractor and sink.

Made my own kitchen 20 odd years ago and still going strong now. Used 18mm shuttering ply for carcasses and shelves. Doors and drawer fronts were made from home milled European larch from a 250 year old specimen tree that blew down. Very hard and very red. The work surfaces are 40mm thick beech block from Ikea and the sink was a huge double sink unit also from Sweden's finest. I now have over 20 years more experience so if I were to do it again I think it might be a bit tidier and more professional but saying that, nothing has ever broken off or otherwise failed and it still looks OK, if a bit used, all these years later.

Have not built my own from, but done several for customers.

Recently helped build a kitchen in Italy, but with bricks that were then rendered.

Honestly, Ikea quality is pretty good (assuming you can follow the instructions), especially for the price. Other advantage is that if you ever get bored of the fronts you can change them easily.

There are other timbers other than oak,ash etc. Try maybe looking towards something like tulipwood, as that quite inexpensive in comparison. But ever there thats quite mainstream. Research is your friend.

I did a kitchen out of reclaimed oak church benches for a customer, who had picked up a churches worth at auction and after having them live in a garage for several years gave them to us.

What a bloody nightmare. Hard to hide the hundreds of joints and mortices broken down furniture has to turn them into cabinets and doors, and the doors themselves needed to be in the lower units 80mm thick. What a long drawn out,annoying, brain boggling job that one turned into.

Limited pics of it. I suppose after that I didnt wanted to be reminded of the turmoil 😆

We used DIY Kitchens and Worktop Express for ours, far cheaper than Howdens, Benchmarx etc and it's all the same stuff. I fitted it all myself - I'd get a kitchen fitter to join the worktop if I did it again.