About Olafun: a small custom kitchen workshop
Olafun is a small workshop that designs and builds made-to-order kitchens for private flats and houses in Moscow and the nearby region. We measure the room, draw the project, make the carcasses, fronts and worktops in our own production, then fit everything on site and connect the appliances. You are not picking a catalogue model and hoping it fits; you are describing a kitchen and getting drawings for that room.
We build kitchens meant to outlast the renovation around them, which is a different job from a kitchen that photographs well. Over 10 years of daily use the work falls on hinges, drawer runners, the worktop and the edges of the carcass, while the fronts mostly stand there and look as they did on the first day. So the first conversation is about what each line of an estimate buys, and about where you can spend less without losing anything you would notice.
How the price of a kitchen is made
An estimate for a kitchen is not one figure with a margin on top of it. It is the carcass, the fronts, the worktop, the hardware and the work, and each of those answers to a separate decision. We would rather walk through those five lines with you than name a total and wait for the wince.
Carcasses are usually laminated chipboard, a material that is stiff, stable and holds screws well when the panels are edged properly. What separates one carcass from another is not the brand of board but the thickness of the panel, how the edges are sealed, and whether the box is squared and braced so it cannot rack. A cabinet that rocks on its adjustable feet was assembled against an out-of-true wall and packed away in a hurry.
Ask what breaks first and the answer is hardware. Hinge cups lose their adjustment, drawer sides sag under a load of pots, and the gas strut holding a lifting flap stops holding it. A hinge can be swapped, but a door that has hung crooked for two years never sits quite right again. That is why we spend on hinges, runners and worktop before we spend on a decorative front.
Buy the hinges, the runners and the worktop first. The front you fell in love with on a swatch is the cheapest thing in the kitchen to change later.
The worktop costs what it costs because it has to be flat, dry and heavy all at once. The price carries the material, laminated chipboard under plastic or a slab of quartz aggregate or acrylic stone, and then the cut for the sink and the hob, the edging, the seal along the wall, and a delivery that cannot be thrown into a car. Thin material over an uneven run of cabinets finds every gap in the first year of use.
What our own production changes
We cut, edge and assemble in our own workshop, so a base run shallower than the usual depth or a column pulled to the height of one person is ordinary work rather than an upgrade. The material and the hours change; nothing is added simply because the size is unusual. The same goes for a unit that has to pass under a boiler, step around a pipe box or follow a wall that is out of true.
The order of the work follows from how the kitchen is made. A measurement comes first, and that visit is also where we ask how you cook, what you keep where, and what you dislike about the kitchen you have now. Then the project: drawings, the layout of the units, and an estimate that says which part of the kitchen each sum buys. Production starts when the room is ready for it, because a panel cut to measured walls should not spend a month in a corridor where somebody is laying screed.
People reach us in two situations. Some are doing the renovation themselves and want a kitchen that fits the room they already have. Others hold an architect's drawings and need somebody to turn a picture into doors that open without knocking into each other. On our side the route is the same either way: measure, draw, make, fit, and hand over a kitchen where everything closes on the first try.
A wall out of true and a niche narrower than the plan are not extras on an invoice. They are the reason we measure before we draw anything.
Fitting is done by the people who built the kitchen, not by a crew hired for the day. We set the carcasses level and in line, hang and adjust the fronts, place the worktop and seal it where it meets the wall, and connect the appliances you have already chosen. Work on a gas hob belongs to the service that maintains the gas line, and we say so rather than touch it ourselves.
What we do not charge for
Unusual sizes are the first thing we do not charge extra for. The second is words: an estimate should not carry a line for prestige, and a kitchen does not become dearer because the room is not a rectangle. Where the price really does rise, we point at the cause, whether that is a stone slab instead of plastic, drawers instead of shelves, or a front that has to be painted in a colour matched by hand.
There are savings we will point out ourselves. Plastic over chipboard is an honest worktop in a flat where nobody cooks a hot dinner every evening. A plain front is enough in a kitchen where the room, not the door, is the interesting part. A cabinet above eye height that gets opened twice a month does not need a lift mechanism. What we do not advise cheapening is hardware, the edges of the carcass and the joint between worktop and wall, because all three are inexpensive now and dear in the second year.
What decides most of the price is not on any price list. It is the plan of the room, how much of it is already fixed, and how many things the kitchen has to hide. The practical next step is a measurement and a talk about how you cook, and the project and the estimate come out of that. Bring the architect's drawings if you have them, and be ready to describe the kitchen you are tired of living in.
