How much did you new kitchen cost? Is it bespoke?

[Kazzabob]

Hi

We are in the process of applying for planning permission for a two storey extension. I'm wanting to change our current kitchen into a larger open planned kitchen with dining and seating area.

Just looking for ideas at the moment and trying to get an idea with regards to costs. Could you let me know @approx cost of kitchen, whether it's off the shelf or bespoke and if there are any companies you would recommend. Got some brochures - Rencraft and Cotteswood have arrived so far! We live in Oxfordshire.

Thank you!

We just sold our house with a beautiful ikea kitchen for 850k. The kitchen cost about £2k plus £1300 granite, £2k appliances and £1000 fitting. It was lovely and I'd use ikea again in our new house.

I am just getting our kitchen done. I think it's going to come in at about 10K for ripping out the old one + floor, making good (stuff has been uncovered...) replastering, painting, tiling, Howden's gloss white kitchen with oak worktops (just over 5K) and dark oak Karndean flooring throughout. Fingers crossed!

my budget is £10k as well. £300k house. it will be from IKEA and we will do what we can ourselves inc sourcing and managing. but we are less about perfection and more about functional and nice.

I'd say a good rule of thumb is between 3 to 5% of house value, so if your house is worth £200k then you should probably be spending £6 -10k on a kitchen. If your house is worth £500k it should be more like £15-25k.

Obviously it depends how much work needs to be done and people have different tastes and different needs but the 3-5% is a good average to use.

Thank God I didn't spend 5% of the value of my house then! Phew!! That would have been some serious money!! Didn't spend 3% either! Have I been a cheapskate?

MillyMollyMama to be honest, yes, you probably have been a bit thrifty with your kitchen! But rules are there to be broken, I'm sure your kitchen is lovely :)

Who makes these rules

Milly you sound very sensible and it obviously looked good as you sold it for a very high price!

This reminds me of the 'rule of thumb' for engagement ring spending

Does the 3-5% rough guideline include appliances and flooring or is it just the units and worktop?

Flip, 4% of the value of our house would be seriously silly money as we live in London.

I'm just a cheapskate, obviously, though DH would think otherwise!

My husband re did our kitchen a year ago. We did it on a budget using our old wood units. He did everything including flooring. I now have a bespoke kitchen that looks shabby chic and undone but in a very good way as this was my intention. It cost us £1,500.00. I don't think you need to spend a load of money to get a nice result at all, just shop around on foot and internet to look for bargins. Works for me as I do not like fitted kitchens that look all proper and well.....fitted.

Just had mine done by B&Q and I'm delighted with it (so far). Cost about £11k for removal of old kitchen, units, sink, hob, cooker hood, lighting, flooring and plastering/decorating (we kept existing oven and dishwasher). I think fitting accounted for more than half of the overall amount and if I want to really depress myself I can look at the breakdown of individual labour costs which are horrific.

Took a week and a half for 2 fitters to install. The quality of workmanship is fantastic and I've booked one of the fitters to do some decorating for me in his own time I was so impressed by him. Only niggle is that I am having a problem with one of the rings on my hob so that is in the process of being sorted.

I have a relatively high value house - I chose Ikea units for £4K, quartz worktops for £3K and appliances £6.5K. Tiles, engineered wood flooring, lighting/electrics, plumbing, plastering and painting came to another £3K and finally installation was another £1.5K.

That's a total of £18K - it's a fairly large kitchen plus a utility room. That total excludes the new windows, bifolding doors and the 2 RSJ's used when we opened up the former kitchen and dining room plus altering existing doorways, extensive rewiring and new plumbing including radiators, doors, architrave, skirting and coving. To be fair, the house needed a complete overhaul and I chose to splurge on appliances and the worktops rather than the unit carcasses.

Ii's very easy to spend a fortune.....just make sure that you have a spreadsheet and list every single item that you want/need and then adjust your expectations/shop around/haggle!

Wow...sounds amazing arna. I live in a little very old Welsh cottage and a small hotch potch bespoke kitchen suits it perfectly. Anything else would just look out of character. Yours sounds gorgeous though. Do you have a picture

Photos would 'out' me so I'd rather not. I did a lot of copious research and I found that I could not beat Ikea carcasses on quality for the price. If I had done anything differently, I might have ordered bespoke doors instead but as it was, we went 15% over budget on the entire project so it's just as well, I didn't.

Ok. Well it sounds lovely. My nearest Ikea would be three hours away. Don't think I have ever been to one. Nearest is three hours away. Enjoy your kitchen.

sorry, should have read before posting that.

I like the 3%-5% rule - although we're still no further at getting a quote. Am hoping our planning will be approved in the next few weeks and then we're going to book some appts. I like the Linear range at Harvey Jones - will see how much it comes in at though. I do like Rencraft and will also see how much a local company charges. I'm looking at @£20k max but will have to see how we go.

Doitforme your kitchen sounds lovely to me. I don't like 'perfect' kitchens either. Do you have any photos you could share?

kitchens have become such big business, but we really don't have to jump on the consumer band wagon.

Hi can you give me the name of the person that made them for you and the painter please

We just had a new bespoke kitchen fitted. We have an open-plan L-shaped kitchen/dining room. Our house is a bog-standard 3-bed 1930s semi so nothing special, but the space was really awkward and the boiler is also in the kitchen and needed to be hidden. We went to a local company with a few showrooms in the North West - they came out and measured up and then came back to us with some possible layouts that were really different to our existing one and basically doubled the storage/worktop space we had before, with a peninsula unit for the hob and a little breakfast bar.

We've got Hacker handleless units and all the appliances are Neff (double oven inc combi microwave, 5-ring hob, fridge freezer, dishwasher, washing machine). We also bought a Rangemaster cooker hood separately.

We used their contractor to do the fitting, and he project managed all the work including some wiring/plumbing, spotlights, a complete replaster of all the walls and ceilings, tiling and finally decorating, as well as the fitting, disposal of the old kitchen etc. Total cost including everything was about £16k.

We were really, really pleased with the service we received; everything went really smoothly with no delays or mistakes, we didn't have to worry about coordinating all the different tradesmen and we love the finished kitchen.

We're just coming to the end of project kitchen, so can share a few thoughts..

We both fell in love with a kitchen in our local Neptune showroom and so set our hearts on something similar.

We have 14 units, a mixture of tall, base and 1 wall unit. We started totting up the total from the Neptune brochure but once the total exceeded £15,000 before we'd added on plinths, end panels, handles and the customisation of units needed to fit in a a former fire-hearth, we decided to find something cheaper.

I priced up similar kitchens (units only) based on all the usual suspects:
DIY Kitchens - Norton Graphite - £4,400
Units Online - Langton Painted - £7,800
Ikea - Laxarby Black Brown - £2,463
Jewson - £5,600
Handmade Kitchens Direct - £7,700 plus painting
Pineland - £7,125

In the end, we went for Pineland for a number of reasons:

1. Fitting units around a former fire-hearth didn't lend it's self to multiples of the usual kitchen unit widths. Pineland could offer a truly 'bespoke' option.
2. We could paint match the finish to Neptune's colour. ahem.

..and we thought overall it would be worth the extra money over the alternatives.

Trawling the internet and liberal use of the various voucher sites, we managed to get all our appliances for ~ £3,500. We could have done this cheaper, but we went for NEFF ovens and dishwasher and a good quality hob, extractor etc This includes an integrated boiling water tap and belfast sink.

The next big expense was the flooring. We had an uneven floor comprising part concrete and part floorboards which presented all sorts of problems for tiling. There was almost nothing to choose cost wise between a limestone floor and an engineered wood floor, so we ended up paying around £2000 for a engineered wood floor fitted. About half of that cost (£1000) was for the fitting.

The final headline figure is for Quartz worktops - at £2000 from a local supplier.

My initial 'budget' was therefore £7,125+£3,500+£2,000+£2,000 = £14,625.
Had we gone with Ikea units, the total would have been just under the £10k mark.

Excluded from this total is fitting (fitted the units myself), splash-back, lighting and taps as well as the general building work, plumbing, electrics etc.

We had no tiling on the walls.

I'd originally hoped to bring the kitchen in much closer to the £10k mark, but we upped the spec on almost every aspect slightly and so the overall cost crept up. I'd like to think the overall look is very similar to that in the local Neptune showroom we were copying which would have cost a good £10k more.

Few observations based on the experience:

1. Don't discount Ikea. They have a very flexible range of unit sizes and their new range have some excellent quality finishes that certainly rival the other high street names.
2. We got a quote from Wren, but I couldn't work out the unit cost from the headline figure they gave us. Overall, I think the cost would have worked out pretty similar had we gone down that route.
3. I would have no hesitation in recommending Pineland kitchens, but be prepared to spend longer fitting the units than regular chipboard carcasses. Units without legs take a lot of manual adjustment.
4. All the flooring options we looked at were much more expensive than we originally thought purely because of the labour cost. We could have covered the floor with el-cheapo tiles, but the average quote we were getting from tilers to fit was over £1000 (board the floor, self levelling compound, fit etc).
5. If you're fitting yourself, you will have lots of left over debris to dispose of. Our local tip has started charging £4 a bag of non recyclable material, with the first bag free. My standard weekend activity now is a early morning trip to the tip on Saturday and Sunday.

This thread is great. Thanks so much for sharing all that information. We are looking at a new kitchen at the moment but it will be a few years before we can afford it.