Just a quick update, I’m sure there’s a million and one kitchen refurb threads on here so I won’t labour too long on it, and probably focus on my mistakes to help others!
As we’d know for many years that I we wanted to re do the kitchen, when we did a small refresh of the doors on the old kitchen we picked a gloss white handless door from b&q which we figured would be reused for the new kitchen down the line. However in 2018 b&q discontinued the model of door we had. Purely by chance I noticed the doors on their website in the clearance section, so I had to start planning the next kitchen lay out and ordering the doors at that time! The bonus was that the doors had 50-70% off the price, but not every size was available and I needed to take a leap of faith in knowing what I’d need.
Fast forward to January sales 2021 and I stride into b&q confident I’d be needing my kitchen soon and wanting to take advantage of the Jan sales discounts. I think the kitchen designer liked me to start with, as I knew exactly what I wanted so the design stage was quick and easy.
However, she didn’t like me quite so much when it came to ordering as the £9k kitchen design above turned into less than a £3k order when all the doors, hinges, and appliances were removed.
Having got the stuff delivered in March 21, I didn’t open the first box until Feb 22! By then played musical kitchens moving the boxes around multiple times while the build continued. That being said, it was marginally worth the hassle as the prices went up so much in a year I’d have paid another £1k for the same stuff in 2022!
Clare likes a bit of flat pack, so with some help from her we quickly threw together most of the units.
I’d not realised you could get different heights of larder units, and we changed our design a bit to have 4 appliances (rather than 2) which meant I needed to drill my own holes for shelves in it. The microwave and coffee machine are a little high, and the top cupboard is small, but we accepted the trade off in order to have two deep draw below.
In the end, I needed to order all new handless doors for the tall units because I didn’t have the right ones from my original stockpile of doors. The new ones have a slightly different handle depth, but as the units are separate from the rest of the kitchen you don’t notice.
I’d also planned to have the integrated dishwasher and washing machine next to each other as per the above (dishwasher in situ), but at least with the appliances we bought you could not have the waste pipe behind the machine and have it flush with the doors on the rest of the units. The waste needs to go behind the next cupboard unit…same for the water connection too really. Therefore I needed to do some rejigging of pipes, and in the end the dishwasher got moved nearer the sink (under the window).
In fitting the cabinets, I used a load of corefix raw plugs (with reinforced metal tubes) to get through the plasterboard and into the blockwork). However, that was a fail because you need to use extra long screws to bridge the gap behind the cabinet and the corefix screws are only as long as the rawl plug. As they’re quite a narrow bore I couldn’t find any suitable longer screws to use.
In the end, I just used 200 x 6mm left over from the roof and buzzed then straight through the cabinet, PB and straight into the thermalite without any plugs. With the cabinet spacers, the cabinets are solid, so job done
I did use the corefix for the wall cabinets, and they’re great for that purpose. Be sure to mark out when your wires are!
I’d also left a gap in the ceiling for the flush extractor fan. This had required some precision measuring as the lip that Neff put on the appliance was only 3mm so not much margin for error. I had made the opening slightly undersized so I ended up shaving a little off, but better that way round than the other! It was ruddy heavy, but here it is about to be hoofed into position.
Next were the worktops. I opted for laminate ones as we may not stay in this house long term so didn’t want to extra expense of granite.
The square edge worktops look smart (in my view) and the real bonus is for corners you can just peel back the edging (using a heatgun) and only need to route then for worktop bolts underneath rather than those male/female cuts.
Then the scary part was all the cuts etc on the breakfast bar for the hob and the connectors. I found using masking tap the mark everything up was really helpful. Also cut with the nice side up to prevent chipping the laminate.
Needless to say there was a lot of cardboard for recycling from all the kitchen units and applicants. I actually did two runs to the tip like this!
Kitchen still isn’t finished as I need to do the floor and the tiling, but we’re using it now.
The kitchen was always going to contribute significantly to the cost overall.
Kitchen cabinets and doors were £3.3k. We went a bit crazy with the appliances at £7.5k. It would have been less, but on opting for the two ovens and wanting an integrated microwave, we needed to keep the appliance symmetry (for my OCD) so an expensive coffee machine was bought as the fourth applicable. My only consolation is that with the exception of the fridge and extractor, everything else was an ex-display or discontinued model so there’s actually more than £10k of appliances if I’d bought them all new!
I also bought a new trend router and jig for the worktops which was another £250.
So total spend now up to £84k ish.
Edit - a holiday snap also seems to have snuck into the picture…I don’t know how do delete after posting, so enjoy Clare and I in LA in April
