Mylands. You always regret your economies. I've repainted this kitchen 4X over the years, and last time was in Dulux which wore so poorly. Just custom mixed a new vibrant duck egg to paint my kitchen in marble matt walls, eggshell woodwork, and floor paint. Mylands matched impeccably. It was a dream of coverage, and looks spectacular. The quality of the pigment shows, looks the money, nothing like synthetic mediocre pigments in cheaper paint. It's a big improvement.

ok, my worst house was actually several years ago, we had to move due to job placement and could find nothing, and with 1 large dog/4 cats rentals are difficult, if non existent. so we ended up in a place, can not say town they were houses scattered along a 10 mile road from one place to another. Anyway, it was called Crapo - that is with a long a thank you very much! As if I would live where you are thinking! lol it was on the back side of the national park on eastern shore of MD. 24 miles from absolutely anywhere, and 2 ways to get to that nowhere. Everyday you drove the park and it took nearly an hour, you never went more than .5 miles without a hairpin turn. Ok, this was true of all the houses, when snow melted ( not much up here or we had a good rain it flooded. Sometimes you could not get home. A couple times you could not leave for days! The county trucks would come by just to watch the waves splash in the houses. fish would swim past your door. hehe. And the road, it was often under water it was in the swamp and at sea level. I have pics, honest, little fish would jump out of the way of your car, sometimes the snakes swam faster. once you started you did not stop and everyone except the jerky out of towners, with their big high hunting vehicles, drove one at a time, not making a wake. And this was at least once or twice a month. One time it was snowing hard and we had to pick up hubby, in the middle of the night, I thought I was going to have to leash the car so we did not slide into the swamp, not that we would have known, you could not see it. It was so bad my dog was sitting in the front seat and kept putting her paw on mine and pushing it. The amazing thing is I worked in the "nearby" town, Adults would come by as they had been seeing their parents. Their parents had gone through this forever, and their parents before them. many, the first floor was unusable. There are still trailers in use there that the gov. gave them more than 10 years ago, after the big hurricane. The homes and trailers are just left empty when the person gets old or dies, kids won't move back, won't even claim it. unless hunters want it, it just stands empty. i would never want to live in that tiny flooded house again. But, I would never trade the experience. Every day we saw Eagles, Bald and Gold. Osprey, Foxes, Turkeys, herds of Deer, and sike. We learned so much. It added about 10 pearls to my necklace.

My husband trusts me and prefers I make all those decisions. That said I always ask his opinion on large pieces. If I left it all to him he would lose interest before finishing! Design is so not his thing. But then I'm not interested in documentaries on outer space or Lego.... Best we stick to our own interests I think! ;)

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.