Wow DH agreed to a new kitchen - am ridiculously excited!!!

[Housemum]

OK so it's bragging but I'm hoping there's someone out there excited about kitchens as I have a grin like a Cheshire Cat when I think that come September/October we will have a gleaming new kitchen and no one except a 2 year old to talk to about it!

Am stunned that DH agreed to it but in the end it was me reining him in on costs as he started looking at more expensive additions that I hadn't dared think about! Think I played it right - went and got a Homebase quote, which was stupidly expensive for the quality (and the "design" they gave me wouldn't have worked as we discovered when talking to the company we're going with - we wouldn't have been able to get the shelves out of the fridge to clean/move them), then when he found that we could get a "proper" kitchen company for £1k more he was ready to sign on the dotted line...

Congratulations. They do fall into line sometimes, don't they

Our kitchen wasn't awful, a few annoying things like it only had space for a tiny under-counter fridge so we had to put a fridge freezer in the garage which is a PITA in the winter as it's bloody cold in there! But now every time I go in I see the grottier bits - the peeling edge of the laminate on the worktop, the discoloured ventilation thing under the oven, the missing bit of plinth under the fridge, the saggy cupboard doors...

congrats. enjoy all the planning and dreaming and drooling!

How exciting. I'm going to be looking for a new kitchen later in the year and just starting my research now. Who are you going with?

I've seen a gorgeous German kitchen but it's mega ££££. I'm hoping that DH will think that anything less than that will be a bargain.

Wow - how exciting....one day i hope i can post a thread title like that

Enjoy!

We've gone with a company called Optiplan - based in the South-East. You can spend loads with them if you go really fancy (curved drawers, glass-fronted cupboards with lights, led lights in the plinths, granite mantles etc) but we are happy that we've got something with a bit of style (lovely granite upstands and a splashback curved to match the cooker hood, end diagonal cupboard to fit an awkward space and stop it just being a flat end, decorative strips of granite either side of the drawer units under the cooker that I now know are called mullions) for the cost of a chain-store kitchen.

We did get the costs down by choosing some cheaper options they had on special offer that still gave us what we wanted, eg restricting the granite to one of their 3 special offer half-price ones (which was a nice black that we'd have chosen anyway) saved us £2k, and the American fridge was £400 (rrp £650), the cooker hood £75 (rrp £150), the Bosch dishwasher for £125 - and we did push them on the price by telling them we had a set budget of £12k and we got what they reckon is a £15k kitchen for £13k in the end.