Pro's and Con's of fitting your dream kitchen yourelf
Pros’s and con’s of fitting your dream kitchen yourself!
With the boom in online sales for flat pack kitchens, more and more people are undertaking the task of planning, purchasing and fitting their own kitchens, so I decided to have a look at some pro’s and con’s of starting a DIY kitchen project.
Pro’s
COST - First and foremost the main reason for taking on a project like a kitchen refit is to keep costs down. With companies offering ‘interest free’ or ‘buy now pay later’ options to encourage buyers to everything they need in one easy purchase, it makes it very appealing for prospective kitchen fitters to create the perfect kitchen on paper and cut out the expensive shop markups. Costs are also kept to a minimum as the need for experienced kitchen fitters is then cut out as you are planning on doing the work yourself.
LEAD TIME – Ordering direct from a supplier often means that lead times for delivery are much, much, shorter than they would be if you were buying from a store or local kitchen fitters as flat pack boxes are often stored in warehouses and can be dispatched by courier within hours. In contrast, in my experience, specialist kitchen companies that supply kitchens to you can take anywhere from 6 to 16 weeks for delivery and you are dependent on fitting around other customers for installation.
Con’s
TIME – A kitchen refit can take anything from 2 to 3 days to 2 to 3 weeks to undertake. This usually means taking time off work to take on the task, which more often than not takes a lot longer than you think – I have heard so many cases of people taking a week off work to do a kitchen, only to be still doing it months later as they can only do the rest of it on evenings and weekends!
QUALITY – As in any industry, there are experts in their field and people who think they are experts. More often than not the experts have years of experience and so know plenty of tricks to get the perfect edge on a corner unit, or a smooth join on a worktop. Experienced home DIY’ers might be great at flat pack furniture but the complex nature of kitchen cabinets, measuring sink holes, aligning kitchen hinges on the doors, and things like that, are a completely different ball game and often results in a far from perfect finish.
KNOWLEDGE – There are many parts that make up the fitting of a kitchen, and even the most helpful of kitchen suppliers will only be able to give you so much advice. It’s often very easy to choose the cupboard doors and worktops in the finish you want, but what about things like the weight the drawers are going to take? If it’s a drawer for cutlery then that’s not too heavy, but if it’s a draw for pots and pans are the drawer runners going to take the weight?
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