About the price of kitchen fittings?

[Albadross]

Quote for our new kitchen. The guy came over to ask me what we wanted, but refused to discuss prices so I had no idea what we'd be able to afford from what I chose.

He comes back with a price of £12K just for the fittings - no building work/floor/tiles etc!!

He then sends over a breakdown of the costs, which shows that one small section of 2 cupboards with curved ends came to 5K on it's own .

Is it beyond the realm of human capability to make a curved bit of wood that doesn't cost more than a fucking small car?! Even the tall cupboard for the fridge to go in costs more than the fridge itself. A cupboard vs something full of technology... I just don't get it.

Curved wood (if real wood) often requires steam bending.

Could you buy cheap carcasses from b and q and put decent doors on them? You have to build those though.

Or wren can be fairly acceptably priced.

Kitchens are outrageously expensive. I kept the price down on mine by: reusing carcasses from the old kitchen where possible. Doing the labour myself. Buying appliances second hand and by not putting the appliances in cupboards. Does mean my kitchen doesn't look fancy. On the plus side visitors can find both the dishwasher and the fridge!

Basic market forces. Same reason why sofas are expensive. If there are 1000s of possible options then there are no economies of scale and everything is more expensive. There are fewer possible designs of fridge than there are possible designs of cupboards to put fridges in

Tell him to jog on and go elsewhere. That is ridiculous.

I got my kitchen 2nd hand off of eBay for £500 😂

Ed Shereen was reflecting on the obscene cost of kitchens on desert island dics this week!

I was quoted £35k for a bloody galley kitchen! Wren quoted £15k for practically the same thing. With much better quality work tops and 2x Neff ovens. Some firms should wear masks when they're trying to rob you blind!

We got our kitchen from wren, but bought our own solid wood worktops.

We got our own fitter, who charged us £1600 for fitting the kitchen and the worktops, one of which was a 4ft long worktop with rounded cut out for a belfast sink.

12k is bloody ridiculous.

We are in the NW though if that makes a difference.

Wickes have 50% off at the moment. We might be buying our kitchen in heritage sage from them. They have a price booklet you can pick up in store and we designed ours ourselves to see what would ft where and what the price would be. Got the design person round just to double check we got the measurements right and he said 7.5k wouldn't be enough with fitting. We added up the units ourselves (14 in total) and it was 3.5 k. So over 4K for fitting.

luckily my friend is a kitchen fitter and has quoted 2 weekends to fit it at £150 per day!

You could buy your kitchen from wherever and then go on mybuilder.com and advertise the jobs you need. I suspect we're going to save 3-4K my sourcing the trades ourselves.

(My galley kitchen came to £1500 inc appliances... but scavenged and we did all the labour ourselves. Solid wood worktop though, and sealed doors so they won't warp.)

DH says they were the cheapest, he included Wren... The builder's going to get two other supplier to quote now.

The cupboards that aren't curved are literally just bog standard with built in handles, nothing special. Surely the fridge housing is just a square box?!

I was given the option of 'wrapped' doors, does anyone know if that costs more?

Where are you based? That is ridiculous. I used to work in Homebase and sell kitchens. Wrapped doors are worth it it means the plastic coating (basically) is fully wrapped around the doors so there are no seams so the coating can't later peel off the doors - generally for gloss doors - cheap kitchens dont have wrapped doors.

Wren are massively expensive and a huge rip off - they trade on the basis their carcasses have solid backs (but their cheaper ranges dont even have the depth to fit a full size dinner plate)

Try homebase and wickes for quotes but you need to be savvy - both do curved ranges which do not need to cost much more although your choice of worktop will cost more if you want curved ends as laminate worktops cannot be curved etc so you have to have solid wood, granite etc etc. Good luck OP but after working selling kitchens its easy to get ripped off!!!

Wickes off the shelf 'takeaway' with a handyman to put it together and upgrades inc good quality worktop and ironmongery is pretty reasonable.

Used to work for Sharps Bedrooms & Moben Kitchens - complete utter rip off for same wrapped MDF.

Wren have an awful reputation!

We managed to totally remodel and refit our kitchen, including getting a steel put in when we removed a load bearing wall for £3k.

We bought the kitchen direct from the manufacturer (using a relatives trade account) and haggled over the price, had a good (busy) chippy to fit it on a day rate so he had to get it done in order to get onto other jobs, solid wood work tops from work tops direct, tiles and floor from Topps.

It looks bloody great!

We bought our kitchen off gumtree. It was brand new, being sold by someone who had bought the house but had a different idea on what they wAnted for the kitchen so didn't want the new but not yet installed one. I paid £300 for all units, sink and worktops. I bought nice handles and sanded then repainted the doors. (They were wood, I wanted sage green)
I bought 2 extra units from IKEA for the corner and a big tall one for the oven.
My friend fitted it all. I think In total it came to less than 2 grand for everything fitted including vinyl, new oven, new LCD consumer unit (electric mains. Our old one was metal and dangerous) and windowsill, skirting etc.
We could never have afforded the 10grand price tags you see

This is a local company in Bucks, a builder who works with a supplier who I think try to sell you everything including fittings first. The company is Benchmarx who are apparently Wickes to the public?

I reckon curved cupboards willl be the 2010s version of those angled end shelves with tiny balustrades around

My howdens kitchen is just as nice as my twice the price of my John Lewis one. It seems to all be in the fitting.

Try www.diy-kitchens.com : great quality and price even if you were to engage a chippie to install it all for you. (I used DH but still way cheaper than wickes or home base)

Agree that DIY Kitchens are fab.

Haint I thought those were way earlier than 2010s!

It's such a ball ache. No wonder people pay more for less hassle. Wickes sale looks good, maybe we'll have a look at that instead.

Our kitchen is a big ish space but with awkward bits sticking out so storage isn't easy. The curves idea was to add in more but without always catching yourself on corners when walking past (we have doors to the garage and utility with unused space in between). It was only one semi-circular shaped unit 2 wide that would've been with curves

Another vote for diy kitchens. We're going with them after reading about them on here.

Just had ours done by Wickes. It cost around 7k all in (quite a small kitchen, quite high quality). Happy with it so we were aware we could have probably got it a bit cheaper if we had used an independent tradesperson. But in the end we went with the easiness of having it fitted by the same people we bought it from. It was during their 'sale' and we also negotiated a bit. Top tip for shopping with Wickes is that if you get childcare vouchers through Edenred you can get pre-loaded gift vouchers for Wickes with 9% off and can buy up to 5k of cards. You can spend them on kitchens and installation. We managed to save an extra £450 by using them.

DIY kitchen is great value, they even supplied me with a design not shown online as I was very specific about what I wanted. A bit nerve wrecking process as I didn't visit the showroom, but I literally saved thousands.

I think benchmarx is owned by Howdens not Wickes.

What about Ikea kitchens?
They get good reviews.