When we bought this house in 2010 we paid £25k less than the asking price as it had been based on the owner replacing the kitchen.
We chose to live with the kitchen as it was for 5-6 years, maybe giving the dark oak a make over with some cream/beige paint.
My last contract job ended in September after which I went for a ride through Europe with good mate Goose (Peter) on our motorcycles.
The job market is a bit slow in my game at the moment so Nicola decided that stripping out the kitchen right back to tiles, lights and power sockets would be a good thing, keeping me busy and saving on installation costs.
We had known what style we wanted for some time as the house is a typical 1920's build, so the next job was to start getting things going.
We had designers from various kitchen companies over to draw up plans and make suggestions on Farmhouse kitchen designs.
Eventually we decided that the "Cook & Lewis" range from B&Q was what we wanted.
The initial quote we got was quite steep, so we came home and Nicola started Googling and Ebay hunting.
I also took the plans and inventory and started deleting about £600's worth of stuff that had been part of the quote, but what I knew from past experience to be unnecessary. Things like bolts, various glues, colour resins etc.... even an E-Cloth for almost £10.... what happened to using an old T-shirt to wipe surfaces ?
We had decided to go for B&Q's Cooke & Lewis Hedingham Solid Oak kitchen.
However, neither of us could find a work top we liked. I had tried about 7 different samples on the display kitchen in the shop, with nothing striking the right note.
One of the shops we had gone to, and got the designer to come out to us from was Homebase.
Nicola and I went to see their display kitchens and then she saw the worktops she wanted in their display.
"Bella Noche" it was and would be, come hell or high water.
So when the B&Q quote came in at £405.00 for 3 x 3000mm lengths, it was Ebay and Google to the rescue. Ultimately we ordered the same items from an Ebay shop for a total of £210.00 delivered.
Door handles and knobs were again an item that was stupidly priced but sourced online for a lot less and when approached, the seller agreed to give us FREE POSTAGE.
While we were in Homebase for our first consult, we saw a kitchen sink that we had wanted on offer...... someone had ordered it, and then either not collected or refused it. However, the item was correct and the price had been knocked from £99.00 down to £25.00 so of course we bought it.
With the taps we had a similar experience, we chose the taps we wanted and when we got to the checkout lady luck was smiling on our wallet..... 50% price reduction.
We found some really nice 100 mm x 100 mm tiles at Vegas Tiles on one of the local industrial estates.....as most places had silly prices on smaller tiles. Getting exactly what she wanted meant that I was allowed to come home via MacDonalds and have a coffee there.
Another bit of advice I am happy to give on this build thread is to say that if you know, or can find someone with a "Trade Card" to see if they will let you use it..... it costs them nothing, but will nett you a significant real world saving on all costs.
In my case, it was a weird connection that got me the use of a Trade card.
My neighbour Mickey does office clearances and sometimes they are where the courts are involved and businesses are shut down, other times they just get the order to clear the space, destroy everything and get paid for taking stuff to the recycling dumps.
In this case, he had scored about 80 Blackberry phones a while ago, some older models and some like the Storm models from a marketing company that had gone bust.
I bought three off him, got a battery and charger off Ebay for the storm and sent it to South Africa.
The other two were meant to be for Tom our son and Gooses on here who had too many phones already.
At a fiver a phone it was not exactly a train smash when Tom said it was not cool enough and Goose refused one, I just popped them on a couple of boards and in minutes they were off at £5.00 each. One was posted and the other was bought by Mr Mucky Helmet of this here parish. He fetched it a few days later and offered me his Trade card that saved us about £1500.00 Needless to say, I could not take his fiver ....... Thanks David.
All of these savings add up and ultimately means you can get more for your money.
While we were redoing the kitchen, we decided to completely change the layout as well as the existing layout was not very sensibly done.... this would mean we were going to replace the integrated Fridge/Feezer units with an American style side by side free standing unit.
Again, Nicola dug around and after finding what we wanted (I refused to have an ice maker or cold water dispenser) online, she also got an extra 10% off voucher online..... I love this girl.
After making our final tweaks I went back to B&Q on the bike and managed to spend 2hr 45 minutes there.....
I had done my own measuring up and found that there was 200mm missing in the calculations that the designer/consultant had made so I challenged him, at first he did not get the fact that one part of his design only added up to 3500mm but I had found from the wall to the side of the cooker/stove there was 3700mm
We then redesigned the kitchen and also removed some of the stuff that was on the original plan.
Regular delivery was quoted at 5-6 weeks from payment and order.
HOWEVER....With the Trade card..... delivery was going to be 6 days.
Added to that, (Seeing will be believing) at a slight reduction in cost vs all flat pack delivery.... the Trade card would see some or all of the carcasses being delivered built up, so assembly, doors, fitting etc still has to be done, but that will save me at least a day on this build.
Now waiting for various deliveries, starting with the work tops coming from Hull tomorrow and the big Orange truck doing its delivery on Thursday.
Today's work and progress to uploaded in a bit.
Trust you are still reading.
This write up has taken me almost an hour to do.
