Kitchen quotation

[clairewitchproject]

We recently received a quotation for a new kitchen which includes putting in some french windows, tiling floor and splashbacks, and all appliances. Wooden worktops and cream cabinets. The room is a slightly awkward shape, about 3 m opening up to 4m and about 4.5 metres long. So not massive but not tiny. The quote is 26,500 quid which seems very steep. In our old house we had a larger kitchen that cost 10,000 all in from Ikea (inlcuding new fridge, tiles and flooring but not cooker) and separately paid 3000 for a larger bifold door....so we were expecting around the 15-17000 mark for this job as it is slightly higher spec worktops and not ikea (I don't like any of their new range). Are we being completely unreasonable?

Get a few more quotes and see I suppose! It is also usually much, much cheaper to buy the kitchen and get your own joiner to fit it rather than using the fitting service provided by the manufacturers. We've just had ours done (much smaller project than yours) and even with our little kitchen there was initially a £2k difference between kitchen quotes, so of course we rang and haggled, and then one company quoted their own fitting service as £1k more than our own joiner. Madness.

There are lots of things you can do to get prices down if you ask. Eg we've got the trade carcasses for our cabinets. Put the doors on and there is no bloody difference, the walls of the cabinets are just a couple of mm thinner than the standard domestic ones but there is a huge price difference! Big difference too between dampers for soft close doors and using the full on soft close hinge. Flat pack vs ready made makes a difference to fitting costs too.

Why not get a quote from another company and see how it compares. I'd also ask for a fully itemised quote so you can see how much the individual components cost, and then check if it might be cheaper to break it down into smaller jobs.