cost of kitchen and bathroom in proportion to value of property or not?

[redmarkone]

Hi property people.

Just a fairly general question as im not quite near the stage of getting quotes etc (have a bit more saving to do!!!!!!).

Hope this question doesnt cause any offence...

When choosing kitchens, bathrooms, flooring, wall tiling and appliances, did you consider cost bracket of house in relation to how much you were spending on the new kitchen?

For example of you had a £270,000 property, would you spend £16,000 on one bathroom but get say an Albion free standing bath at £3k, fired earth tiles at £2k , expensive flooring/ shower and premium brand everything else (then installation)or would you stick to a mid range brands such as grohe or Wickes or get it done for £8,000?

If you had a £600K property, would you expect to see a £25,000 kitchen or a £12k one?

The question assumes you would be staying in the property for about 5-7 years after installation.

A very ponderous question but would welcome any thoughts.

Thanks for your help.

i definitely think you can price a house out the market.
A house near here - very ordinary 2 bed + box room, 2 smallish living rooms and a smallish kitchen was bought by a developer and transformed into a high end, open plan sort of show home which not that I nosed on line of course look very high end to me, but the price the house is now on for is laughable - I'd say a good £200 000 more than anyone is likely to pay. He's never going to recoup the money because people just don't pay that much for houses on this street.

If you have the money, and are going to live with it for 7 years, then spend whatever you want - that's a long time to live with a bathroom or kitchen you aren't keen on and feel you might have compromised on.
If you are thinking 'will I recoup my investment though', then, no, you probably won't if you spend ridiclous amounts on an "ordinary" house.

Of course, whether £270 000 is an 'ordinary' / expensive / cheap house is going to depend where in the country it is.

I think you can overspend on a less expensive house but you can splash on a few things, but not everything. £3000 on a bath is a bit ott. However Grohe fittings are very good so why install more expensive ones than that? Cheap floor tiles may be ok and Fired Earth a very expensive. You can get similar a lot cheaper for quite a few of their range. I like Porcelanosa and especially their large format tiles.

If your house is worth £270,000 I think about 10% on the kitchen and no more than 5% on the main bathroom. My main en suite bathroom (we have 4 bathrooms) cost about £22,000 including fitting and tiling. It is what you would expect in a high value house. My friends who have lesser value homes spent less. If you will love your bathroom, go for it, but don’t expect the money back. Just expect to sell quicker then a similar property.

I think Wickes are lower end personally.

As longer as you don’t expect to get your money ‘back’ when you come to sell crack on and install a super fancy bathroom if you want it.

I do find cheap bathrooms and cheap kitchens offputting in expensive houses - in a £750k house I don’t expect to see a budget kitchen installed cheaply.

There is, generally, a correlation between the price of a property and the price of the kitchen/bathroom but ...

You are going to live here for the next 5~7 years so get what makes you happy whilst keeping an eye on what makes the general public happy (no avocado-coloured bidet). So go with your heart but don't lose your head.

It's not a clear-cut case of all-expensive versus all-cheap. As an analogy, people often wear designer handbags with High Street clothes. Can you go for a kitchen/bathroom that's mostly in keeping with the price of the house but throw in the odd expensive item to give it a bit of je ne sais quoi. Conversely, a bit of (hidden) cheapness too.

Irrespective of the cost of materials, I think that you get biggest bang for your buck through good design.

We haven't gone crazy with our kitchen and bathrooms. Our kitchen is about 12k and ensuite/cloakroom about 4K tops!

Our house is worth about £415k maybe more. We've prioritised size of our extension rather than expensive fittings. Although here's a lot of haggling!!

I think the key thing if you anticipate staying for 5-7 years is to choose things you love and will enjoy using, but remember that classics don't date and a real statement bathroom or kitchen is unlikely to be to everyone's taste and may be reflected in offers you receive when you come to sell. And look after things - a five year old kitchen or bathroom that has been trashed will need replacing.

I'd aim for 10% of property value on a kitchen and 5% on the main bathroom. If you're staying for seven years then you'll have your use out of them. Choose something fairly neutral and modern if you're planning to move on though. Many people will see a fairly new but hideous kitchen as a liability because they're paying for the kitchen and will still have to replace it.

The 10% rule has always puzzled me, because property prices vary by location more than anything else. If you live in a gorgeous Edwardian 3-bed villa, it might be worth £300K near Hull, but the exact same house would be worth £900K in commuter belt South East. Why/how would the person in the South east spend £60K more on their kitchen?

I manage rental properties, including some smart ones for a family member. One of the parts I hate most (other than dealing with agents, tenants, builders, accountants etc) is the "shopping".

However it is easier for me as there is no emotion. On kitchens my advice would be to keep everything plain other than one expensive item. So look at the floors showrooms use, and you will see they are mainly dark gray slate effect. (Don't get anything ribbed though as awful to clean.) Then ask around about the quality of carcasses, and find a mid-range manufacturer and look at the back of their catalogue for their budget lines (assuming the carcasses are of the same quality) and go for something that won't date like cream. If you have a good carcass you can always update the doors. Put in good appliances, landlords traditionally use Bosch, as you can usually get them supplied at a trade price, and you want them to last. I recently put in a kitchen in a million pound 2-bed flat for £15,000 but half the amount was on the worksurface, which included a large breakfast bar. The designers advice was that it should be as light as possible, even though I ended up with a greyish marble effect on cream units. (Which looks fine.)The dark comes from the floor. Ignore the extras like built in wine racks unless there is a small space to fill, as these are expensive. Assuming you don't need too many tiles,. I go for good quality (better than Topps tiles - if you have a World's End Tiles or similar specialist supplier near you, ask for the trade counter and see what end of range stuff they have) but again light and plain.

The one wow factor applies with bathrooms too, and is usually the shower. Good quality cubicle (one of the cheaper equivalents to Makti), and great shower head, ideally with the key pipes exposed so you don't need to faff with tiling should something go. Straightforward white porcelain from established British brands, and good taps. You want to be able to get parts and you don't want it to date.

Talk to the sales people and ask their advice, especially if they see a lot of designers. A good one will get the brief of value-for-money quality, timeless and low maintenance, as this is typical for people buying for rentals or hotels.

Well I massively under-spent then I have Ikea cabinets but bought the appliances elsewhere.

They are all touch screen so look expensive but they weren't, I believe my oven was £425, the combi micro was £450 but my hob was expensive, it is induction and cost £850. To offset this I have a Beko integrated dishwasher. I have had Bosh in previous houses and I think the Beko is just as good at half the price.

I do have an instant hot water tap.

My recent bathroom refit cost nowhere near 5% of the house price.

I use builder's merchants, trade places, and shop online for stuff. But then I have time to research things. I spent almost a year planning the kitchen as we had an extension built.

To me this is like clothing/accessories, you could spend £2000 on a handbag, but you can get one that is just as good quality wise for a fraction of that price. Brand names rely on you recognising them and thinking wow that cost X.

Quality doesn't always comes with a fancy name and price tag.

Buying Beko is never a good choice though! There is skimping and then there is skimping. I would not expect a house with a £850 induction hob to have a Beko dishwasher!

I think if you are living in a £2m house, you probably will not spend 10%. However if your house is £160,000 spending up to 10% is a possibility with appliances and flooring. The whole point is that you judge what is needed for the house but a cheap kitchen usually looks cheap. Ditto bathrooms. You can alleviate this by good use of more expensive fittings and good design.

@origamiwarrior The person in the south-east would spend more on the kitchen because the installer would charge more due to having higher overheads in terms of showroom costs and salaries etc. You could buy the same kitchen in the north for thousands of pounds less.

I think that’s spending £16k on a kitchen in a house worth £160 k is madness. Unless you have plenty money, love the kitchen and plan to stay there for a long time.

If I had £16 to spend I’d use £6k max on the kitchen and use the £10k to reduce the mortgage.

Spend what you like. If your house is not in an expensive area, you won’t make your money back. But if it makes you happy, that’s more important. Life is short!

The percentage rule doesn’t work very well at higher house prices. If your house is worth £5million, you don’t need to spend half a million on a kitchen

Our house is prob worth around £115-125k, we bought for less because it needed stuff doing to it.I definitely thought about the value of the house when making reno choices although I also went more than just ‘the cheapest’. So bathroom all in was just over £5k, but some of that was comparatively cheap (the shower bath and screen) some of it was higher spec than basic (Mira thermostatic rainhead shower) and some was a bit of a splurge (tiling two walls with £24/sqm tiles).

Same when doing the floors, I did kind of want karndean or similar, but it seemed silly to spend that much on a very ordinary sixties semi, so went with a posher laminate.

Even if we're talking lower values (£160K) the "10% on a kitchen" depends hugely on the location (=property prices), so it's impossible to have a blanket rule. Take this random property local to me:www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-51801888.html It would be impossible (and crazy) to spend 16K on a new kitchen!

I'd love to know where you can get a kitchen for £6k! Appliances would cost at least £2k. Then there's the cost of flooring, decorating, lighting and paying the fitter/electrician/plumber/tiler. I'd expect to pay £10k as a minimum. Average UK spend on a kitchen is £10-£25k.

I think that 10% of house value for a kitchen sounds crazy expensive. Even 5% is a very generous budget and I’ve never spent more than 3% on the kitchen. And the most I’d spend on a bathroom would be 2% of the house value. And I’m design mad and love fancier things. I’d probably apply the 3-5% & 2% rules to anything at 200k+. Obviously, it doesn’t matter if it’s a ‘forever home’ but if it’s somewhere for 5-7 years, I would be careful not to overspent so that you can actually then afford to move up the ladder.

Thanks to you all for your replies. Lots of food for thought. Im going to read them thoroughly and then come back.

Wow, we’ve bought a house recently for £300k (midlands) and are looking to replace the kitchen. Even looking at really decent quality, I don’t think it will cost anything near £30k. If we incorporate everything on our wish list it’s coming out at around £18k.

A common mistake ppl are making here (and in life generally) is that spending £££ automatically buys you quality/a tasteful kitchen/bathroom or whatever it may be, whereas spending £ is the reverse. That's simply not true. I've seen some truly god awful kitchens/bathrooms in my time that were mega bucks to put in, and some stunning, beautifully finished ones that were put together on a tight budget.

We spent £12k on house valued at about £225k, including neff appliances, silestone worktops and DIY kitchen units, so just over 5% for a kitchen I love. I spent a lot of time shopping around for sinks etc, but even if I hadn't I don't think an extra £10k would have added anything.

hi again.
thanks for further replies.
with my original post, i was purely giving examples as i didnt want to reveal too much but here goes, we live in a house at around £550k. in the town we live in, the most expensive homes are about 900k but there are literally a handful on the market currently and most houses are up to the £450k mark on rightmove at the moment.

we have very simple tastes and want a matte white kitchen handle -less with a solid oak worktop and pale matte grey/taupe floor tiling. we'd be installing units/worktops ourselves, everything else done by professionals -
electrics/plumbing and tiling.

wouldnt put fancy appliances in - bosch would be most expensive maker. we think this would cost around the £9k mark.

does the above sound commensurate with price and are value?

thanks

I wouldn't expect to recoup the cost of putting in an expensive kitchen or bathroom if I were going to move in a few years time.

Before we bought the house we are in now, we saw another house that DH loved. It belonged to an older couple and was immaculate. The kitchen was fully fitted and only a couple of years old. The house price reflected that. But I hated the style of it. Would have wanted to rip it out and replace with something modern, but couldn't justify doing that!

So I'd put in the decor you want. Because whoever buys the house may want to change it anyway.

OP I think if your kitchen isn’t huge, you could do that no problem, especially with Oak Worktops. In our old 3 bed semi, I spent £1.5k on the kitchen and the same for fitting + laminate flooring throughout. For our extension (on a £350k house), all in with granite worktops and appliances it’ll be about £16k, but that’s on a huge, dream kitchen and I don’t care about recouping spend as we’re planning on being here for 10+ years. In my opinion 10% of house value is completely bonkers! Same with bathrooms. We did our ensuite and family bathroom for £10k all in and both have excellent quality, British made fittings. I adore both. Do what you want do AND what you can afford.