@michael Morton - quickest way to tidy trashed kids rooms is to get them to tidy it up themselves, usually just before they want (not need) to go somewhere or do something. Few episodes of you supervising + encouraging them along will soon see the amount of trashing of rooms decrease. Gritted teeth go a long way during this learning curve. Doesn't matter how small they are now - from 2yrs up, don't expect perfection. Wait til they reach 13-14yrs to try this - woahhh - you'll wish you had a bedroom tidy elf! The other way to look at it is ask yourself, will you lasting lifelong regret be that you didn't spend more time tidying up rooms!

Hi everyone! Thanks for all the comments and input, it was great to see so many of you get involved! The competition is now closed, and any winners should have received an email from us confirming their prize so get checking. Happy New Year and here's to the next one!

Thank you for everyone's comments, had no idea this thread would prove so popular when I started it. We are plastering this week and we have finally bought most things for the kitchen. I did find some real 'finds' though if anyone is looking. Not sure where you are based, but regarding electrical goods we researched all our own and narrowed down our list, and once we had that we looked online for the best prices for each appliance. Instead of buying from lots of different places we took it to Bentalls, who not only matched, but also cost us less, and beat some online prices with a good 'deal' price they also then will hold on to them until you need them, but if anything goes wrong you have 'bentalls' rather than several online dealers to return items to. RDO Appliances also do this if there is one near you, but i'd advise you to research prices first. Another thing we found was inserts for the kitchens. Through our kitchen supplier these were expensive, bin inserts, pull out drawers, pull out larders, even the pop up sockets, sourced seperately through ebay and online we managed to save quite a lot of money by doing this, so our fitter will still have the right things on the day, but we are not getting the inserts from the supplier. What else..... erm kitchen worktop, unbelievably the exact same worktop, same material, same cut outs etc.. same sizes differed between suppliers by 3k! so do shop around for your quartz and granite.

I would lose the wooden counter top and pull out larder. Put the hob next door but one to the sink with an extractor above. This will break up the run of wall units. Also think about when you are cooking pasta, filling up a saucepan with water and then draining it. You don't need to cross the room. Where you going to put bin, dishwasher and microwave? I would agree you need more drawers. I love my new pan drawers they hold alot. But my pull out larder does not and things fall down the back all the time. Also when you are taking something out of the oven, where are you going to put it? I never understand why designers put oven and fridges next to one another.