Kitchens

A kitchen refurbishment can easily get very expensive, depending on what you want to achieve. Making some compromises can make your kitchen much more affordable. In a nutshell, the more minimalistic you keep the kitchen, the better the overall price.

What affects the price the most:

• Number of corners – The more corners your kitchen has, the more labour intensive the work will be. Corners are expensive from a material point of view, they require a lot of end panels that are very expensive. It also means a lot of cuts on site, for example the worktop takes much longer to fit when needing one or more 90 degree mitre cuts.
  • The number of corners in your kitchen would have a much bigger effect on price than the number of units
  • Another example where this would apply is a kitchen island. A standard kitchen island has only 3 units and a 900mm worktop on top. The problem would be that the island would need 5 panels (on all sides, so the white units are hidden). Panels are expensive, for this reason the price of the island would be as much as probably 6 units fitted from wall to wall somewhere else.
• Hardware – It’s normal to want a lot of drawers and fancy systems (like pull out units, plinth drawers). They can be very expensive and they take a lot of time to fit, so the price can easily increase.
• Moving things around – moving the electric points/plumbing can take a lot of time, especially if you want to move the extractor hood, oven or hob.
  • The most expensive part when moving things around is if you have solid walls. Brick or concrete walls are very hard to work with to incorporate pipes, so if you have a solid wall, it will make a huge difference if you can keep the layout more or less the same. The worst is if you have a granite wall where is close to impossible to drill, for example it can take almost a full day using specialised tools to drill for a new extractor hood vent outside.
• Solid worktops – granite/quartz worktops can get very expensive, especially if you want a lot of cuts/grooves
  • Solid wood worktops are more expensive than laminate worktops, but considerably cheaper than the quartz or granite.
• Appliances – the price for changing all the appliances can start at £1-£2k, but they can easily exceed £10k if you choose the top of the range
• Lighting – downlights are common in kitchens, but they can add a significant amount of the total cost. The price is not because of the actual downlights, which are relatively inexpensive and easy to fit, but from the work needed to make the area good. After fitting the downlights, we have to repair/plaster the ceiling + painting (ceiling is the hardest part to plaster/paint), so this costs a lot in the end.
• Number of units – Getting larger units instead of smaller ones will make the price more affordable.

It’s best if you can offer us a budget you want to keep everything within, it saves a lot of time on all sides. When quoting for a kitchen and we don’t have a budget, we quote for what we think is best for the kitchen and we ignore the affordability of the project. When we have a budget we have to work around, we can offer you a quote that maximises what you can get within that budget.

From a business point of view, we prefer you to supply your own kitchen. The reason we supply our kitchens is because customers like to have the convenience of having someone dealing with everything.

Getting a kitchen, even from well established national retailers, is extremely stressful. Although we have trade accounts and buy in large volumes, it’s still stressful and frustrating getting everything we need for a kitchen. Kitchens are a big puzzle, a lot of various components and it’s enough even for a small bit to be missing to create a lot of problems when fitting it.

If you want to buy your own kitchen and only want us to fit and refurbish the rest of the room, it makes sense to take multiple quotes from some showrooms.

We’re happy to fit most kitchens like Wren, Howdens, B&Q or Magnet. Between these 4, the quality is comparable and you get pretty much the same thing if you spend the same amount of money. They also represent probably the largest part of the market, chances are that you know several people that had kitchens supplied by these companies.

If you can afford it, the local cabinet makers in your area can be exceptional, to the point of art. But they can be very expensive, someone showed us a quote for a 14 units kitchen (on a supply only basis) at £60000! (Our quote for a full house refurbishment including the kitchen and 2 bathrooms supplied and fitted was considerably less than that figure. )

Yes, of course. We are contractors and we rely on the labour charge, not on the products we supply. You can go to places like Wren, Magnet or others and we’re more than happy to use that kitchen and work based on that design. The only kitchen we wouldn’t be able to consider fitting would be from Ikea.

The difference would be the warranty terms. If you get the kitchen supplied by somebody else, the warranty won’t cover the actual kitchen. If we supply everything, then you’ll have the peace of mind that it takes just an email to us to sort any possible issue.

No, we will not be able to offer a 3D design since this would mean our quotes take much longer to compute. We are already struggling to send all the quotes within a reasonable time, so for this reason we can’t spend time on a 3D design.

We try to be extremely good about warranty. If we supplied the item and fitted it, we’ll return for any sort of issues you might have. Just email us and this will get sorted asap.

We aim to start most projects in 3-4 weeks. Unfortunately this is not always achievable and the waiting time can easily jump to 2-3 months or more, depending on the period when you contact us.

We’re constantly working to find the right people and expand our team. This mean that in the future we should be able to offer earlier start dates.

We cover at the moment the following postcodes:

Aberdeen: AB10, AB11, AB12, AB13, AB14, AB15, AB16, AB21, AB22, AB23, AB24, AB25, AB32. AB39, AB51.

Dundee: DD1, DD2, DD3, DD4, DD5

You should take a quote as soon as possible. Even if you don’t go ahead with the quote, we would be able to quickly update the quote if you decide to go ahead at some point in the future.

Usually, we send our quotes in a few days after we discuss your project requirements. Please let us know if you haven’t received your offer in a few days.

We order the kitchen components from various suppliers: drawers systems from a place, units from another, worktops from another and so on. Combining multiple supplier to create a kitchen package means that we can offer more options for your kitchen, reduce potential delivery delays and offer great value for money packages.

No, at the moment we can’t offer finance.

You can get instead a home improvement loan. You can use a website like MoneySupermarket to find a deal best suited for your circumstances.

Yes, as a rule of thumb our smallest projects take a few days to complete. This generally translates into a small bathroom or kitchen refurbishment. Sometimes we accept doing smaller jobs, but this is usually reserved for our past customers only.

There are plenty of handymen and property maintenance companies out there for those very small jobs around your home if this is what you’re looking for. Those businesses are more optimised to deal with small projects, we are more optimised for the larger residential jobs.

Yes, we are the main contractor and we can deal with all trades for your project. A multi-trade project is what suits our team best.