Evening
Are these still worth a look? seen a lot of recommendations for them on here before.
Anyone else worth looking at ?
Kitchen is looking tired and will need sorting next year.

Cheers

Yes

Aye

Lots of previous threads – short answer is yes.
However, avoid Worktop Express – they packed my £1000 worktop badly, refused to let me collect it myself and when it arrived in two pieces refused to accept responsibility.

As an aside, Is anyone on here a Howdens registered account holder.
I like the look of a few of their wortops but could do with a price before commiting / finding a local with an account.

Ikea kitchens really are excellent.

Ikea kitchens really are excellent

No there not.

For my sins I fitted two sets of kitchen units in my house last year.

One IKEA and one wren.

Unit for unit cost the IKEA was drastically more expensive than the mid range wren

And the IKEA units are made mostly of cardboard and duckspit. Oh and 2 of the doors arrived damaged. -i only had 5 units from them

Only positive I found is you can lift and position carcass with one hand.

Cheers guys, will have to get measuring and dust the wallet off.
Was also looking at Worktop Express, shame to hear they messed up.

I’ve had oak worktops from WE, very good, well priced, really good quality.

Never used kitchens direct, but FIL (who has fitted kitchens for dozens of folk) was mightily impressed by them.

Worktop express managed to get ours to us undamaged twice…. But we had unfinished and no thin areas left after cut outs.

Ikea kitchens really are excellent.

Yep. Put two in now. One from the old system and one new one. Both have been great. Proper pricing too so you don’t need to get a made up total with a massive discount. Long guarantee, not that I’ve needed it

I’ll be buying my first kitchen next year. Literally have no idea where to start.

+1 for DIY Kitchens, just fitted one. Bought oak worktops from them too. Seem much the same price/quality as others we’d seen.

Edit: because I haven’t shown it off enough: https://www.instagram.com/p/CU-shE1sgdB/

Nice job that. What colour blue is that?

Watching

As an aside, Is anyone on here a Howdens registered account holder.
I like the look of a few of their wortops but could do with a price before commiting / finding a local with an account.

I’ve got an account, message me with what you need. I’m based in Wirral so the quote will be from my local branch but your nearest branch will match or beat it (they compete with each other)

My guess on colour is Farrow and Ball, Hague Blue?

I think it’s the same kitchen as ours that I fitted a few years ago ☺️

I thought they were great. I barely had to talk to anyone, and their online planner was great for working out how to use our weird shaped room.

Did have to do some re-orders and had some quality issues, but they sorted it all out pretty well.

Wish I’d fit it myself though, fitter made a pigs ear of it.

@houndlegs cheers! It’s the Cobham Blue. We wanted a mid blue, but the custom colour would have pushed the delivery back 6 weeks and made a mess of our plans, but in the end we’re really happy with it.

I’ve nothing but praise for DIY kitchens. We sent them a plan and they made the basket up for us to check out with. Great price and fab quality. A friend of mine who sells overpriced German kitchens to people with more money than sense was very impressed.

I bought a kitchen recently for my daughters new flat, looked at Wren, MKM, Howdens, DIY kitchen and eventually bought online from Better Kitchens. I am very impressed with the quality and the service, very solid pre built units including all the drawers and doors coming already fitted. The price was really good as well. They don’t do any appliances but thats ok. Bought the worktops from Worktops Express and they were great as well.

+1 DIY Kitchens
+1 Worktop express

WE actually were really good, packaged well and even fixed an issue where I’d measured wrong for the cut out, as I’d sent them the kitchen plan they’d realised someone was off and phoned me up asking me to double check before they started cutting.

Happily use both companies again.

DIY Kitchens great price, great product, fantastic customer service in my experience.

They have an online planner, I recommend using it before buying, unlike me 🙄.

Edit: Units are all pre built!

I would recommend getting a fitter to fit so you don’t have to.

Also make sure you remove everything, and I mean everything before starting.
This means you can get any electrical work done first, as well as plumbing that needs to be sorted before putting units in (plastering too if you are going down that route).

If you can setup a kitchen somewhere else in the house then do that before, I recommend a portable induction hob for cooking. But really if you can get away that is even better!

I can recommend quickstep flooring too, walking barefoot at the moment, no underfloor heating and it is comfortable.

Another +1.

If your anything like a sensible distance from their showroom, its well worth going.

The online 3d planner is very good (was in beta for a while with limited users but I think is open to everyone now?).

The choice of units is massive (lots of sizes that werent available elsewhere), the quality is spot on, they come pre-built (or even dry assembled if you ask for them) .

Could not reccomend more.

Having never fitted a kitchen before, I designed and built a kitchen around a number of constraints that a nubmer of ‘professionals’ (Wren, Howdens) said was not possible.

Would definitely use again.

The choice of units is massive (lots of sizes that werent available elsewhere), the quality is spot on, they come pre-built (or even dry assembled if you ask for them) .

Could not reccomend more.

Having never fitted a kitchen before, I designed and built a kitchen around a number of constraints that a nubmer of ‘professionals’ (Wren, Howdens) said was not possible.

Yup, this was one of the big advantages for me. Got a quote from Dove (recommended by our builder) for something like £7k (cabinets, doors, worktops, all fittings). Some things they couldn’t do, and the only way they could reduce the price was compromising further. Came up with my own design and priced it up on DIY Kitchens. With some creative use of their parts, I solved a lot of problems and created some nice features. Cost £4.5k for everything except plinth, pelmet & cornice (did them in solid oak from local timber merchants, was about half the price of matching painted!) and handles. Got a quote based on that design from Howdens to compare. They had to compromise on some things too (e.g. they just don’t make angled corner wall cabinets, so that was that), and it still came out at £9k 🤣

On the other hand, it’s a ballache learning all the different cabinets and bits you need – spent way too much of my life doing that, but I’d still do it again. The thing that p****d me off about the quotes from the big boys was the lack of transparency. Doves wouldn’t even break the price down further than furniture/worktops 🙄

Another +1 for DIY. The builder had Howdens prep a design, I replicated that with DIY for a lot less pennies. The fitter reckoned the units were better quality than Howdens, which was good to hear.

Only headache was the matt painted doors/drawer fronts we specced weren’t packed properly (or packed too soon after painting), so had shiny patches where they’d rubbed in transit. They were very good about it and sent their own fitter to sort it out – though he ended up visiting 3 times, as each set of replacements were similarly shiny 🙄