Kitchen fitter quote seems expensive

[catweasel44]

We have selected a kitchen from DIY kitchens - the cost is £4000

We've just had the quote from our kitchen fitter and it's £7,000 (although that includes a quartz worktop and replacing a window).

We were expecting it to be about £5k

Does it sound a lot to you or were we just being optimistic.

Does that include the cost of the quartz? In which case perhaps not ott depending on size of kitchen / amount of quartz, quotes for ours were between £4.5 - £6k, though I managed to get them down to £3. Then our fitting (not including worktops) is going to be around £800-1k (but a friend is doing it) and a window allow maybe £4-500 so it's probably not that far off assuming the quote includes price of the quartz.

You could look at Minerva type surfaces as a compromise?

Yes it does - I've also just realised that VAT is on top of that though!

Ask him to break down the quote for you otherwise it's pretty meaningless. Most kitchen fitters work out their charges on a per unit fitting basis.

Are you getting fitting through the company, if so then the fitter won't e getting anywhere near that. He'll probably be getting around 40% of the fit price. DH is a kitchen fitter. Also, is this for just a standard fit or are there extra works involved like moving pipes, plastering etc?

It does seem very expensive

DIY kitchens don't do fitting so he is an independent fitter. There is some extra work moving gas pipe and installing a few new sockets.

I've asked him to break it down

Where in the UK are you? My kitchen has just been fitted for 1k by a local builder. It’s 18’x10’ and has base units on one side and wall and base units on the other. It took them 6 days.

We're in the Midlands, so hardly knightsbridge.

We had our kitchen fitted by an independent and it cost just under £3k excluding the worktops which were sourced and fitted by someone else.
5m by 3m kitchen plus a 3m by 2.5m utility.
He was worth every penny.
I think the quartz plus fitting was about £5k but there is lots of it.

Mine is costing me £4200 plus vat.
The plumbing and electric is a separate quote.
I feel it’s expensive but I know it will be done very well by the builder that is doing work on my house right now.

I think the Quartz could be what's driving the price up. Where did you get yours from?

It may be that we can get it cheaper elsewhere.

I'm presuming he won't fit it anyway.

We got our quartz from Mister Marble. It was the best quote we found (we also have a lot of it). They cut and fit it on site. There was a lot of dirt on the driveway afterwards but they did clean up after themselves. It took the morning to get it all fitted.

We're currently assembling and fitting a large IKEA kitchen with bespoke doors. It took one hour for me to assemble one sodding drawer this morning. £20k would feel like a bargain to me at the moment.