[Closed] New Kitchen - What to look out for

Buy an A3 graph paper pad and draw up a scale drawing of your kitchen and utilities, and then plan, plan, plan. Don't rush. There is a triangle of kitchen design, I think it's sink, fridge, cooker.

Look at Benchmarx, Howdens etc and laugh at their idea of pricing, then buy from http://www.diy-kitchens.com.

Wooden worktops from http://www.worktop-express.co.uk

Find a local independent kitchen fitter to install, if you don't fancy it.

Also consider extractor duct route in the plan. Avoid fan only if you can and if ducting try and keep it straight as possible and large diameter.

If moving your cooker you'll need a gas man / sparky to sort the services to it.

Ikea stuff is good. It comes with a decent warranty and a good range of cabinet options. Its also very easy to fit if you do consider DIY. You could fit the cabinets then get someone in to do the worktops. That'll be a lot cheaper. They have a nice kitchen design app. Probably still worth playing with even if you go with someone else.

I'd also consider doing the utility and the kitchen at different times then you can use the utility as a kitchen while the kitchen is being done.

Some good points above. A proper external extractor is a must IMO. Drains are the only really awkward thing, everything else can be moved pretty easily but the less you move from where it is now the simpler it'll be.

if you have kids/dogs stay away from high gloss kitchens.

From the experience, personal and of friends, never never never, ever allow a big company Ikea/B&Q etc to use their cheap ass subbies to fit it.

If you need fitters, get a personal recommendations from people you trust.

Howdens are worth a look, I know two people with kitchens from them and they're very nice. We've also liked some of the Ikea ones we've seen - albeit only in showrooms as I don't know anyone with one.

Sounds like you're getting it designed, they should be able to guide you through the process and stop you making any daft mistakes.

We've been looking as ours will be replaced this year too.

In your OP, you mentioned all the names I would completely ignore! Magnet will charge the earth for fitting, everything is sub contracted & variable quality. Wren have an awful customer relations & QC reputation.

If if you know what you want DIY kitchens are great. Ikea very good for the price. I’ve just fitted a solid wood bespoke kitchen (painted & fitted by me) For a big kitchen, including a big pull-out larder & double pantry cupboard, 21 cabinets cost me £10k.

we are moving our kitchen and fiting a new one soon. Ikea carcasses and plykea doors + worktop is the current plan.

I am in the middle of fitting the kitchen out which was a kitchen, utility and corridor.

You need to be really clear on your expectations and what you do and don't like, and challenge those opinions.

There is just so much variety that you are not constricted much so can have pretty much anything you want, this makes choosing difficult.

Also do not get everything from one place as the prices are too high on some items when buying a whole kitchen.  Sinks, taps and worktops are the usual items to get from elsewhere worktop-express or trading depot.

Most places will do a design for you but as above get your ruler and squared paper out first.

Don't forget to think about lighting too...

How did I forget to mention lighting.

I asked the wife how she wanted to work and got the response 'on and off obviously'

What this really meant was one switch for the kitchen, one for over the island, one for the dining room and one for over the table.  Plus 2 switches for the under island LEDs and the under counter lights.

So, 6 switches later.......

Good thing I am doing the work myself or she would have driven the contractors mad unless they had a massive crystal ball.

Before you start on the shiny stuff:

Room size?

Shape?

Kitchen layout

Budget

Lighting

Heating

Dining space?

building work?

I've just completed a project. Basically a new kitchen, but.............Knocking out 3 structural walls, small extension, fitting 2x sets bifold, move boiler, plumbing, electrics, fit new kitchen, bespoke cabinets, quartz worktops incl 3m island, appliances (range, American FF, DW, wine fridge), underfloor heating, slate flooring, sort floor levels, build front porch, remodel downstairs utility room/toilet, replace very large rotten deck on sloping garden plot with retaining wall and patio, building control, planning and architects fees. Total cost 70k. 2 builders for 3 months plus electrician and plumber as required.

Make sure your open dishwasher door doesn't clash with the path of your big s****y plates drawer...

Wherever you go you can take at least 25% off their starting price, they budge like mad driven hard even your B&Qs.

I'm in the middle of a kitchen refit. Looked seriously at DIY kitchens (generally seem to have the best feedback) but ended up going with B&Q units for a few reasons (cheaper and flatpacked which suited us better). Quality of the units seems OK, service has been poor (messed up deliveries, messed up returns, messed up exchanges... you get the general idea!). We've done OK out of it as have been 'compensated' but wouldn't wholeheartedly recommend.

As suggested in previous posts, we've not got everything from one supplier. Worktops are from toprite (good service on some curved laminate tops), appliances from various online sources. Cabinet hinges from Screwfix (same group as B&Q, same part, 2/3 of the price...). It's surprising how much you can save doing this...

What age are your house electrics?  You may have to budget for a new fuseboard (£500) as well as the rewire

<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12px; background-color: #eeeeee;">we are moving our kitchen and fiting a new one soon. Ikea carcasses and plykea doors + worktop is the current plan.</span>

Same here. We had an Ikea kitchen in the last house and it seems really well put together and thought out, our wall was wonky so we used a 3x2" to space the cabinets out from the wall and used a 720mm worktop. The ash worktop was from Worktopexpress and we weren't so happy with that, we had end caps added which shrank but they weren't interested unless it had been fitted exactly as they specified.

Last summer we knocked down a structural wall, new flooring throughout downstairs, new patio doors, new kitchen, put bits of old kitchen in the utility.

We ended up using Howdens for the cabinets,doors, runners, hinges, taps,sink (make sure you dont pay any where near full price, we got an 80% discount - laughable really, not really sure who pays 'full' price), they seem well made and so far (only 6 months ) are holding up well.

We went to a local place for quartz worktops.

We got appliances from who ever was cheapest on the internet.

Flooring from local flooring place.

patio doors from local door place

local small builder did the wall knockdown.

etc etc

I dont like to use the phrase, but we 'project managed' it ourselves, lining up the various trades to arrive in order was pretty frustrating, we were let down by the plumber, and electrician, but thats the risk you take if you dont get one firm to do everything, the upside is that you should end up saving quite a lot of money doing it yourself using various local suppliers.

There's no point in me telling you what it cost (every kitchen is different) , and I probably could have nearly halved what we paid by choosing cheaper options for everything, as an example though, laminate worktops would have cost less than £500, the quartz worktops we chose were £3k, but could have been up to £5k with the only difference being a different colour quartz. Solid wood doors on the cabinets would have been £2k more than the MDF doors we ended up with etc etc.

You'll most likely need an electrician regardless of whether you move anything , as a modern double oven probably has more electrical load than whatever you have currently, and you may find you have to raise any plug sockets a few inches to clear the upstand your wife will inevitably want on the worktop.

We ditched the gas hob for an induction hob, which is great, absolutely no complaints about it, but if you go the same route make sure you get one with a very high power rating, there are some that will run off a standard 13amp socket, but these can only provide max power to one ring at a time, if you try to run 2 rings at full power, it shares the power between them meanig neither actually reaches full power.

Massive pan drawers are good. You don't want to have to go digging for the right pan and lid, nor do you want to have to stack them in a specific order to make them fit.

There are two options here, buy a kitchen yourself and employ someone to fit it or, if you buy one from a kitchen supplier (B&Q and the like), make sure they use their own fitters, not a third party or a company linked to them. If you do and any problems arise, each one will blame the other and you'll end up demented.

I wouldn’t dismiss the local place either. Find the company that has a workshop attached to a shonkey office. You may be happily surprised. I deal in timber products and it was hurting me to install an mdf kitchen (I like good, just not enough money!) wicks / magnet / magnet type prices were circa £25k plus appliances and worktops. I ended up paying (ok, addmitidly mainly cash) £11k for solid oak carcasses and doors  (and I do mean 100% oak), custom sized for larder walls etc which I had painted by another local firm in a two pac paint that looks genuinely, like new 18minths later. I got work surface from a local granite place and the appliances from John Lewis (love that price match!) and appliances online for the bits they didn’t have. I’m a very happy bunny as is Mrs bits.

IKEA kitchens have deeper cupboards than most and lower kickboards so more space for stuff. Also their hardware is made by Blum which is as good as it gets.

IKEA have a brilliant 3D kitchen design page on their website.

Then as per qwerty in the first reply.

Can't see DIY Kitchens mentioned yet...

If getting it designed go for as much symmetry as possible - not withstanding the usual triangle requirement - the human eye likes symmetry...

My sister said to get lots of pan drawers, would agree and the use of pan draws eith side of the main oven allowed for better symmetry over the design using normal cupboards.

don't have the washing machine integrated as they vibrate a lot.

some of the miele kit is not much more than bosch but has a longer expected lifetime and looks a lot better freestanding.

You can get a freestanding fridge/freezer and build and enclosure around it to make it look decent - lots of examples on the web.

Need to position the ovens with sides to unload onto - i was going to have mine above each other in a tall unit but the split to one under the hob and one in a tall unit I have now is much better for unloading.

Some designs around are a slight update of the shaker style and might look decent over time better, I thought of a slab design but that will look like the equivalent of a 70s formica nightmare in a few years.

Use google images to search for ideas. collect up the ones you like and make a 'mood board'.

don't bother with those taps that dole out hot water as they seem to break a lot. Get matching dualit accesories (toaster, kettle) instead.

Contract your own fitters rather than through a kitchen company and pay them a proper rate.  You'll get a better job.

Do you own designs - have an idea of the layout you want before you get other people doing it.  We did change a few things based on recommendations of designer last time but they were minor.

Ikea are good value and surprisingly good quality but flat pack means your labour costs are higher than pre-built units (offsets some of the saving).

Wren are terrible,  I've not been impressed by the Howdens kitchens I've seen.  The best made cabinets we've had or seen have been a UK company Mereway (John Lewis sell as some of their own brand ranges).  You used to be able to get them at a good price from https://alarisavenue.co.uk/

Pan drawers are great but they add a lot of cost over cupboards. the wider the drawers you go for the more important it is to have really high quallity mechanism.

I have the Mereway Virginia - very nice it is too 🙂

We fitted a Next125 kitchen this time. Cabinets came assembled but nowhere near as solid as Mereway. No solid top, thin back panel -very little strength until fixed in place.

Mereway cabinets would be solid enough to use freestanding. Described as glued and doweled but i'd swear ours had some kind of weird angled junction between the top and sides that looked like it had plastic melted into - it didn't look like a simple square dowel and glue joint.

https://merewaykitchens.co.uk/our-solutions/our-approach

second the brilliant ikea design tool on their website, although grid paper, pen and pencil still works.
everyone says 'think of the work triangle, cooker, sink, fridge' but I've no idea what makes good triangle or a bad one! i also think its more fridge to worktop, larder cupboards to worktop, worktop to sink, worktop to hob and so on. so the 'triangle' is a bit simple anyway.

Your kitchen is never big enough, FACT.

Don't forget plenty of power sockets. kitchens seem to get more and more gadgets.

If you go looking at cabinets then it can be hard at first to tell cheap from a bit less cheap, but look for solid back panel not just a bar and a flimsy bit of hardbard and look for triple density chip board construction ( each panel has a dense layer at the surfaces, less dense in the middle). Look for good hinges and drawer runners by blum. Look for easily adjustable legs and wall brackets to make the fitting easier. Doors I reckon are subject to the most fashion changes and the glossy no handle look is in, but when it goes out (and it will) I reckon it will look very dated (just my view though). Personally i like a wood finish. Wood finish is also a bit more forgiving to a scratch/bit of damage than a glossy finish, which may or may not be important.

I've not used ikea units but have heard they have no service gap at the back. on the plus this makes them all a bit bigger inside, on the minus fitting can be much harder where pipes are needed/walls are not straight, unless you go with a deeper worktop and use a bit of stud timber to pack off the wall.

some other thoughts.

if your kitchen is large and has plenty of storage then its great to have workspace without wall units cluttering the space. however if you need all the storage you can get most (all but the very cheapest?) manufacturers do 2 or 3 height/sizes of wall unit, and of course the top is further storage (although space somewhere in a base unit to store a folding stool gets useful!). Lighting strips under the wall the wall units a nice for lighting the worktop area and combatting any cluttered feel the cupboards bring. the tops of wall units are a pain to dust...stick a few sheets of newspaper up there and just change it for clean every few months.

If doing a kitchen again (or rather when) if it was big enough i'd consider 2 dishwashers and simply take clean from one and stack dirty in the other....I can't decide, i that clever or is that the height of laziness!

Jambo

Were looking at same thing. Costed plykea fronts for our Kitchen at 5K, so found CNC place to do it for 1K. Might be worth looking into before you purchase?

<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 16px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: #eeeeee;">unless you go with a deeper worktop and use a bit of stud timber to pack off the wall.</span>

weve donethis with all of our kitchens even if they did have a service void. Unless you really can’t spare the floor space an extra 10cm of worktop depth makes a big difference, especially if you have cupboards above.

NeilNevill - putting 2 dishwashers in our kitchen was the best decision we made. I basically refitted our old one with a new integrated door, as well as a new main one.

i would put up some pictures, but haven’t worked it out on the new forum yet!

I seem to be a bit of a minority in these threads because I'd recommend Wren.

We were all set to go with Howdens but popped in to see what Wren could do. Not only did the designer come up with stuff that Howdens hadn't even thought of, they then knocked £2k off Howdens price. It was all delivered as ready made units, no damage to anything and everything was there. Fitted it myself and considering it was my first attempt it does actually look great.

I'm sure someone will come back with a horror story but it might be worth a visit to them?

There’s no issue with a Wren kitchen. The problem seems to be actually getting what you ordered, and subsequent service with any issues. I guess 80% of their customers get a lovely kitchen & 20% have a complete horror story! Why take the risk when other similar companies offer the same kitchens without the BS.

There’s no issue with a Wren kitchen

Friend's fitted a few Howdens in developments then Wren in his own house because it came up cheaper.  Quality a definitely drop.  Cheaper hinges and fittings.  Doors only finished on the outside.  Finish on the doors very fragile. he regrets it.

Were looking at same thing. Costed plykea fronts for our Kitchen at 5K, so found CNC place to do it for 1K. Might be worth looking into before you purchase?

sounds interesting. got a link?

Simon - interesting. As above my last : kitchens have all been solid wood carcasses and in-frame doors, self painted & fitted. The intricacies of wrap coated doors & chipboard grades certainly aren’t my speciality.

One thing I do know- a well fitted cheap kitchen is better than a poorly fitted expensive one! Gear a good fitter & work from there imho.

One thing I do know- a well fitted cheap kitchen is better than a poorly fitted expensive one! Gear a good fitter & work from there imho.

fitting units isn't actually hard to do well - it just needs a lot of time spent setting out, levelling up. Sometimes going back and redoing it if things settle. We batten the wall and fix units back and to each other.  Fitting crews on a fixed price are always likely to rush that bit.

neatly scribing filler panels and fitting worktops takes a bit more skill.

Agreed!!

The fact people always think of Wren & Magnet just shows the power of Branding and marketing. A small local company who works on reputation & word of mouth would always be a far better starting point for most.

Two dishwashers.

I've promised my wife that if she ever croaks it before me then first thing I'm going to do is fit another dishwasher. Even before I throw her crap out.

Think of the saved time loading and unloading. Plus the cupboard space.

Edit. Sorry bin dun

I got the boxes from Howdens then got a carpenter to make the doors from tulipwood with proper hinges, oak for the worktop, oak cutouts formed two small table tops, handles from Hafele and then a coat of F and B French Grey. Overall cost approximated to one of the cheaper kitchen fitting firms but I got exactly what I wanted and it looks a bit like one from John Lewis of Hungerford.

Go for a 700 worktop if you can, gives you so much more room for services at the back of the units. One slightly misplaced waste pipe and the unit will not fit back. We do this on all our kitchens.

Go for a 700 worktop if you can, gives you so much more room for services at the back of the units. One slightly misplaced waste pipe and the unit will not fit back. We do this on all our kitchens.

Maybe your plumber should learn how to 1st fix? 😉

Not really, it proves a much better solution, ease of access for stop tap, some units have very little room at the back anyway, enables a proper size washing machine as opposed to integrated which are more expensive and in the ops case everything will already be in place so it will give extra room to hopefully use existing services. It's very little cost for extra gain.