How to save on a fitted kitchen without losing quality
Author Diarmuid Linehan, Site foreman: kitchens, from first survey to snag list
You take the saving out of what you look at, and you put the money into what moves and what gets wet. Fronts, wall units and the inside faces of a cabinet carcase can be plainer without the kitchen feeling cheaper for it. Hinges, drawer runners, the worktop and the run of the water and gas cannot.
I price kitchens for a living, and the number rarely comes down because somebody picked a cheaper board. It comes down when the plan stops fighting the room: fewer boxes doing more work, the pipes left where they already are, and the money spent on the few parts that carry everything else. Here is where I look first.
Where the money in a fitted kitchen actually goes
A fitted kitchen is priced in four piles: carcases, fronts, worktop, and the hardware that makes the first two move, with measuring, drawing and fitting laid over all of it. Change the fronts or the worktop and the price moves. Change the hardware and the length of the kitchen's life moves. Most people argue about the wrong two.
In most quotes the fronts and the cabinet carcase together carry more of the total than anything else, because that is where board, finish and hand hours meet. Hardware is a small share of the roubles and a large share of the trouble. A stone top can outweigh both of them; a laminate top on a straight run does not. Treat those as proportions of a number you have not been given yet, because the split for your room depends on the wall you have and the drawing you bring.
The other thing that moves the number is how many boxes the drawing asks for. A run of six base cabinets holding eighteen drawers and a shelf apiece costs more than four cabinets holding three deep drawers each, on the same wall and under the same work. We make the boxes in our own workshop, so an odd depth or height is ordinary work here rather than an uplift, and that means the saving has to come from the count of parts and the finish, not from forcing your walls into the 600–700 mm base unit that is standard only in a house somebody built to a catalogue.
What you can make simpler without the kitchen suffering
A flat front in laminate or foil takes money out of a kitchen faster than any other single decision, and shows it least. A painted front costs hours of spraying, sanding and drying. A routed or curved one costs a machined board and a finisher who then has to hide the joins. A plain one costs a press and a sheet.
A flat front is not a cheaper look. It is the same look with the hand hours taken out.
If somebody cooks in this kitchen every day, ask the fitters what a wrapped front does beside a hob before you price one. I have that argument with them most months. I say a painted finish loses it, and they say I have never spent ten years scrubbing one, and I have no answer except to point at what refinishing costs when the edges lift.
Wall units are where you can be plainest. Their doors open a fraction as often as the ones under the work and they hold plates rather than pans, so a 300 mm deep box with a hinged door is all they ask for. Take them up to the ceiling rather than leaving a gap to catch fat: the extra storage then costs you board, not another door, another pair of hinges and another afternoon of hanging.
Inside the boxes, plain foil-faced board does the work. Moisture-resistant board is worth paying for under the sink and beside the dishwasher, and it is wasted in a cabinet that holds six mugs. A thick back panel earns its money on an open shelved run and earns nothing behind a front. Handles are a cheaper question than people expect: a handleless profile along every door and drawer is dear and it catches grease along the lip, while ordinary handles cost almost nothing and can be swapped in an afternoon.
What tells on you in the first year
Cheap hardware announces itself inside 12 months, and it does it twice a day. A hinge is a small pressed-steel part with a spring in it, working several hundred cycles a year on a door that is at its heaviest when it is half full. A cheap one lets that door drop by a millimetre at a time until two of them meet when they close.
The part is never the expensive thing. It is the day's work to reach it.
Drawer runners say it louder. An extension runner carries a full drawer's load on a line of rollers or balls running inside a channel, and a light runner under a deep drawer of pans begins to bind in the second year. Once that channel is worn, no adjustment brings it back. Soft-close is not a luxury either. It is the reason a door is not slammed, and a door that is never slammed stops shaking itself loose.
Anything that meets water tells as fast. A thin worktop over the sink run swells at the cut-out the first time water stands there, and the joint between a laminate top and a wall out of plumb opens long before the front edge of that top is scratched. A 26 mm laminate top is honest work along a run of drawers and a poor thing under an in-sink draining board. Buy the 38 mm top and the moisture-resistant board where the water is, before you buy anything visible from the doorway.
Why keeping the plumbing and gas where they are saves money
It does, and it is usually the biggest saving on a plan that has nothing to do with joinery. A sink can only sit where water and waste can reach it at a fall, so moving it even a metre means chasing a floor or boxing a duct, and that is a plumber, a builder and several days rather than a cabinetmaker working an afternoon. The wet corner of a kitchen is a fixed point, and I would rather price around it than against it.
A gas hob is stricter again. It stays where the gas comes in unless a gas engineer runs a new pipe and signs the work off, which is a licensed job with its own visit and its own paperwork, and the cost of it sits in the visits rather than in the copper. An electric hob gives you a freedom a gas one does not, and in a kitchen being rearranged rather than replaced that is often the cheapest way to change the whole layout without opening a wall.
The other layout decision people pay for twice is the appliance column. A tall housing for an oven and a microwave is built around the machines you mean to buy, with their ventilation gaps, their socket positions and their door swing, and the sockets want to sit in the neighbouring cabinet rather than behind the oven, where the oven has to come out before anything can be unplugged. Get that wrong afterwards and you are moving a housing screwed to its neighbours, or living with a machine you cannot switch off at the wall.
What is dearer to change later than to do properly now
Anything fixed to something else. A worktop is tied to the sink cut-out, the hob cut-out, the splashback and the level of every cabinet beneath it, so replacing one is a day of work and a new sink rim with it. A sink is the opposite: one that drops into the cut-out lifts out, and a better one drops into the same hole, so buy a sensible one now and change the bowl in five years if you still want a bigger one.
Then come the parts that are cheap and buried. Hinges and drawer runners cost little as parts and a great deal as labour, because replacing all of them means emptying the kitchen and taking every door off its hang. The levelling of the base cabinets, the feet and the plinth that hold them up, and the board under the sink are the same story: invisible on the day you pay, expensive on the day they move.
Before you ask anyone to price this, measure the wall and mark where the water, the waste, the gas point and the sockets already sit. Write down the machines you intend to buy, with their dimensions. Then note what you actually cook in a week, because that decides how many boxes you need, and the count of boxes is what you are really paying for.
