After much procrastination the time has come to spend some of my beloved retirement stash on a new kitchen 🙁 Current Kitchen units are 25 years old and falling apart despite much repairing!

When going in to see the ‘designers’ how accurate do my measurements need to be of my kitchen? Down to the mm?

Can anyone recommend a kitchen supplier?

Any good tips?

Cheers!

Where are you?
Can you fit it yourself?
Budget?
Room size?

I’ve just fitted my own kitchen – electrics, plumbing and stone worktops done by the pro’s.

Treat yourself and push the boat out on an expensive kitchen/higher quality kitchen. I regret not doing so when we got our extension built. Total kitchen cost us about £10k with units from Howdens (so bog standard off the shelf stuff typical of the usual high street suppliers) and appliances from AO.com. It’s nice but after 2 years is showing signs of wear and tear. My brother got his kitchen done at the same time, similar size kitchen but he went for a high quality German kitchen and cost him £25k all in. It looks much, much nicer, actually it is stunning, and 2 years on still looks brand new. I can see me having to change out my kitchen in about 5 years or so if this rate of wear and tear continues, so by then I’d have been much better off splashing out more initially and getting something of much better quality than the standard stuff you get off the usual high street suppliers/kitchen suppliers.

If there is one room in the house you should invest in it is your kitchen. In Germany where everyone rents the kitchen is the one thing they take with them when they move from one rented property to another.

On dimensions you can be as accurate as you want really as once the initial design is done and you sign on the dotted line then they’ll carry out their own survey and take all the measurements themselves. I just used a tape measure and that was good enough when I went through the process.

How long are you staying at the house and what’s your budget?

16 years ago we had a kitchen fitted by a friend who has a bespoke kitchen company. He did us a great deal and it cost £10k for everything apart from the appliances, electrics and tiling (which he organised for us. It’s been repainted once and it still looks like new – and we have 3 kids and two dogs!

Hopefully next year we’ll be adding another 5m run of units when we knock some walls down next year…. I fear this addition will cost in the region of £20k but that will include a pair of Miele ovens and new granite in the existing kitchen.

From my experience it seems worth spending on the kitchen as they last better, potentially look nicer and can definitely help when it comes to selling a property

We just did this, we got our designed at B&Q which gave us the basic layout we wanted. Then using their software I changed it around quite a bit.
Eventually we went with http://www.diy-kitchens.com and I drew the layout using CAD at work. Working out all the bits you needed was quite tricky but they double checked everything for us and suggested a couple of ideas.
The quality of the stuff from DIY Kitchens was superb for the money. We got a joiner to fit it as part of our extension/renovations and he thought the quality was great. The price was similar to a bog standard B&Q kitchen but much better in my opinion.

We fit Leicht Kitchens for a living, apparently Germanys no.1 Kitchen by volume…. They are much nicer than Howdens etc. and a lot more customisation available. The group 1 kitchens can be supplied at a lower cost usually than Howdens too according to the designers in the shop.

not a sales pitch, just maybe think outside the normal suppliers box a bit and you maybe surprised at what you can get for your cash.

I will say this however, good fitting can make a bad kitchen ok, bad fitting can ruin even the most expensive products.

Be as accurate as you can with your measuring and info, take notes of where the soil boxings, doorways, windows, gas/elect meters, existing supplies, stop cock and sockets are. this will make the designers job easier and your price more accurate.