New kitchen time

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irw

Quadricyclist
Location
Liverpool, UK
We did our kitchen units with ones from B&Q about 3 years ago or so, and found them dead easy to put together, and of expected quality. Fast forward to last month, and a friend of ours wanted to refit the kitchen in the house he rents out- we decided to go with B&Q carcasses again, as I had a load of spare doors to fit them. I got so frustrated with the 'new' B&Q units, as they now seem to be much more fiddly, with very poor instructions, that I, at one point, literally screwed the instructions up and tossed them aside. For what it's worth, I'm extremely adept at flat pack stuff, building things from scratch, or a combination of the two!

On the plus side, as my kitchen worktops are still waiting to be done properly, we decided to buy the router jig and a couple of other neccessary bits to actually do the worktop joints properly...now that we've practiced on his, mine are on the cards for the summer!
 

Electric_Andy

Heavy Metal Fan
Location
Plymouth
We used a small independent kitchen shop for the doors, drawers and handles. Cam out at about £1k for everything. They didn't do carcasses so we bought them from B&Q but only needed 2 extra as we used the old ones for the rest. We used a dedicated timber merchants for the worktops (Totem Timber, but I think they're only in Plymouth).

The B&Q carcasses were fine, but the drawer runners were slightly problematic, we even had one set of drawer runners that were a different design between L&R. My Dad had to compromise between getting the drawers to open properly and getting the gaps even on either side. Everything worked well but the more discerning person might well get annoyed at the lack of absolute perfection.

We were advised against soft-close fixings for drawers so we avoided them. My partner has these and they've always been a problem. They tend to stop working, or come loose, or both. The Indy chap said he could sell them to us but wouldn't advise it. Apparently the good ones that work are hard to find and very pricey.

The work tops were fine, you just need a router and a dedicated worktop jig (~£80 IIRC). Best to do a test run on scrap first, as the real skill is setting up the jig correctly and getting your bearings on which way things should go in the jig!
 
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