Fitted kitchens

[Jux]

I hate them with a passion. Am I the only person who does?

We shall be downsizing sometime in the next 5 years, and I really really want a kitchen with a cooker, sink, maybe a store cupboard/pantry, but that's it.

I have beautiful kitchen furniture, picked up for virtually nothing from marketplace, markets, boot sales etc. I want to be able to arrange (and sometimes re-arrange) my kitchen. I hate thehorrible (and no, I've never seen a nice example) kitchen cupboards etc you get with the fitted stuff. And you can never change your mind about e.g. having a cupboard over there and putting the table here, then the dresser can go there, and the tall ctore cupboard with the meat slab could go in there, and that will be more interesting and work better... blah blahblah.

It's cheaper than moving house, cheaper than putting a new kitchen in, and you have these lovely old freestanding cupboards which are being recycled again and again, and were made really well, and are all on casters so easy to change around, move, easy to repaint; just move them and you can repaint or paper the walls, easy to get at the pipes, electrics etc.

Can I find a smallish house without a fitted kitchen? No. We'd have to break one out before we did anything else. PITA

You'd have loved my house when I bought it - the owners had lovely freestanding kitchen furniture and took it with them so when I moved in there was just one pipe standing up out of the floor with a tap on it, nothing else.

It didn't event have electricity and the kitchen light and all their appliances had run off a line of connected extension leads.

I like fitted kitchens quite possibly because DM refused to have one and her kitchen always looked cluttered. Mind, now she has a fitted kitchen it is still cluttered! She isn't a great believer in putting things away.

You might find then that the type of house I suggested upthread isn't affordable - if it's never had a fitted kitchen put in since it was built and now being sold as probate it probably will also need rewiring, roof work and a whole host of other stuff. We've done this twice with houses and have ended up with wonderful homes as we want them but it's been disruptive and expensive.

It might be better to buy a house in better condition and try to sell the kitchen, with the buyer taking it away?

I prefer freestanding, I especially dislike the kitchens that look like operating theatres. I would probably just buy a house with an older kitchen that will need replacing anyway then do it to your taste.

You will never find the perfect house unless you have an unlimited budget, plenty of houses have older kitchens, ours is 25 years old, semi fitted and is what you would call serviceable but I guess a new owner would replace it to what they want if we sold the house, we certainly wouldn't replace the kitchen to sell it.

There’s a middle way with kitchen design though. Not everyone wants handleless or very sleek look. A good clean worksurface of a decent length for prep and serving is vital though. There are kitchens without kick boards but cleaning under them? No thanks. Open shelves collect grease and dust. Again a design statement that’s awful to look after. Most people prefer a kitchen that’s easy to work in and clean. They are less interested in amassing bits and pieces of furniture and repurposing.

20+ years ago we did a freestanding kitchen at a previous (Victorian) house. I can't actually recall what the octogenarian seller had by way of a kitchen but it was obviously pretty manky as she was a heavy smoker and the walls throughout the four bed house were nicotine stained. All I know is we ripped the old kitchen out asap!

We replaced it with a 6' pitch pine dresser, a marble topped washstand (that served as a prep space) and a custom built belfast sink unit with drainer and cupboards under. We had a freestanding single oven.

Our main reason for doing this wasn't specifically that we preferred the unfitted look - although we did like that style - but more because the room was small, of an odd shape and had three doors, one of which led to a large walk-in larder/pantry which was where we kept our food and small appliances.

In theory it was hideously impracticable, especially with a young family to prep meals for and feed - the 'work surfaces' such as they were were either too high (dresser) or too low (washstand). That didn't stop our now adult DS doing something similar in his own previous house a few years back - he went with lots of vintage cupboards which he (being handy like DH) adapted to fit a belfast sink etc and added worktops made from old slate he bought on ebay. His worked much better as a usable space!

With the benefit of hindsight - we were young and inexperienced house renovators at the time - we'd have moved the kitchen to one of the three reception rooms as we already had our scrubbed pine table and various other 'kitchen' cupboards in one of those, which we used as an extension of the kitchen. Then, I'm not sure freestanding would have been our first choice.

In our current (project) house one of the first things we did was relocate the kitchen to what is imho a better room for it, but - whilst we're not fans of clinical/glossy kitchens - at no point did we we consider foregoing traditional hand-painted, in-frame cabinets for freestanding...although we do have a huge preloved Victorian larder and vintage butcher's block incorporated into the HMKOC kitchen as our look is still fairly quirky......