i know, right! i nearly fell off my chair. Apparently they have a huge waiting list at the moment and as of last thursday, were booking up for early Feb! i am based in surrey. it doesnt sound like they have many fitters based in that area!

you are most correct, asifa. i'm in touch with her now :)

this is it

no offence taken - i regretted not saying integrated by the end but i needed to get back to work haha!!

jonathan - £28k from memory that was with the current 50% off units deal!!! :O!!

I'm looking at getting our kitchen from DIY Kitchens - went up there last month and was really impressed with the kitchens up there.. if you know what you're looking for and what kind of units etc you can choose all the individual units.

This is really reassuring to hear AMB!

Anyone reading this who’s tempted to take on a project all by themselves - please get you ‘own design’ safety checked by a credible pro before ordering anything ! Stay safe peeps !

Please don’t design the kitchen yourself as suggested by an earlier poster. By the time you have paid for fitting this will have cost you £30,000+ so it is important to get it right. The kitchens available from everywhere other than the big sheds will have significantly more cabinet choice too making it a very tricky job.

Every few weeks someone on Houzz proudly shows off their kitchen transformation and although an improvement on whatever taken out I can often count things they have chosen that even to my untrained eye look out of place. A recent project I noticed had 18 things that were either very personal choices or just plain weird, the owner doesn’t see them but if they ever come to sell the next owner may well and they may not be able to recoup their investment.

I say get a professional designer to plan for you- you can pay someone who sells only design or find someone who knows what they are doing at an independent showroom. Either way they will come up with an improvement in the design that sounds like it was knocked up during your lunch hour. There are 8 things on this plan that in my opinion could be improved and a few things where I wonder why they did that- I’m sure OnePlan will have helped you see some of them already.

Another vote for DIY kitchens from me, I could not beat the price we received on our kitchen anywhere else. I tried local independents too as many people seem to get a better deal that way, sadly that was not my experience at all, not sure if that is related to prices near London where we are located, but quotes came back pretty high. The service at DIY was also great, they can answer any question related to the tiniest detail of a specific unit within minutes over the phone. We purchased our kitchen without visiting the factory, having only seen the sample doors that they send out. A BIG thank you to OnePlan who drew up the plans for me, this was so helpful to see everything in the space to scale. I had an idea of the layout I wanted, but having this drawn up professionally with the correct (safe) space being left around the island etc. along with Karen's ideas and suggestions was invaluable. I fully appreciate that DIY kitchens or similar is not everyone's idea of a dream kitchen, but as part of a full house renovation, budget was key for us. I've added some photos of our kitchen here (please be kind :-)), they are not the best light etc. and snapped a while back on my phone. The kitchen is not quite complete in these photos distressed mirror splash back still to go up, and mantel shelf over chimney, art work is now up too. New sofa also coming next week yay :-) , but you can get the idea of number of units etc. All units came in at just under £6,500, Silestone quartz worktops from an independent supplier including fitting £4k. We had a full house renovation done and the builder fitted the kitchen for £1800 as part of that, the units come assembled so it really is only a 2-3 day job to fit. (The quote of £6,500 for fitting seems outrageous to me). The total spend for the kitchen was under £15,000 including everything, new appliances and pendant lighting etc. Kitchens are really subjective, and while this will not be the perfect kitchen for many, but it is our perfect kitchen, we love it. If you don't have a Devol or Martin Moore budget, you can still fit a kitchen that you will be over the moon with. ;-)

Sam N, your kitchen looks so fab! such a good price too compared with other quotes i've had back. ours is potentially going to be about the same size, so good to have a guide. how did you find ordering with them once you had one plan, is it just a case of emailing them over a list? which range is this and colour? is that £15k a;ll in inc fitting? sorry for all the questions!!

Thank you for your lovely comments! I am always a bit hesitant to post photos, interiors are so subjective and I'm nervous of negative comments lol....silly I know, but we worked so hard on the renovations and basically lived on a freezing cold building site for 8 months, the end result is totally worth it, but I am probably more attached to it than I should be, like a protective Mum :-). I wanted to post though because other people sharing photos helped us so much along the way.

Mary, re ordering with DIY, every single element you need is listed separately on their website you just need to go through methodically and add everything to your basket, (it sounds way worse than it is in practice :-)). Once this is done, you can send them your design and the reference number for your order and they will check you have everything you need. They spotted that I had missed an end post that I needed. I must have called them 10 times during the whole process and they could always answer my question straight away, or with a quick call down to their technical team. I did miss one end panel too that the builder realised when fitting, it did not delay the fitting and he just added it when it arrived about 8 days later. The £15k was for everything including fitting. Fitting was £1800, worktops fitted were £4k which was a great price for the amount of Silestone. We got this from Henderstone, I would recommend them. Integrated larder fridge, dishwasher, under counter freezer all from AO at a total cost of £850, Delonghi range cooker also £850. Appliances are not high end, but standard brands, the fridge is integrated and we did not require an ice dispenser or anything fancy, I can live with a bag of ice in the freezer for my G&T's :-) so as long as the fridge does its job i.e. stays cold, I'm happy. The units are Helmsley in-frame, the grey units around the walls are from their standard range of colours it's called 'soft grey'. The island is Hague Blue, they offer their units in any Farrow and Ball colour of your choice. This is then called Helmsley Bespoke. A little tip; going for the bespoke option adds about 30% to the price of the units, so if there is a colour that you like in the standard range it helps keep costs down to go for that for the bulk of the kitchen and then accent with less units in the more costly option. This is what we did with the island, luckily we genuinely loved the soft grey anyway, so this worked well for us. I also totally agree with Asifa, it is all in the fitting, a really budget kitchen fitted well and with good worktops can look amazing, a high end kitchen poorly fitted cheapens the end result. Hope this is helpful, sorry for the long post! ;-)

I also wanted to write a quick note re using a designer, I like to think I am my own designer and know what I want lol....so I have shied away from using them in the past. But from a space planning perspective it was invaluable to us. I sent OnePlan a truly terrible pre-school drawing of the basic layout I hoped to achieve, along with some notes on what we wanted the kitchen to offer us and what we would like to include if possible. Karen managed to turn my dodgy sketch into a plan that enabled us to see the space would really work. For example, I was worried about fitting a sofa etc. in without it feeling cramped. Karen's drawings showed this was more than possible. The cost was so much less than I would have imagined, really very very reasonable and so worth it for such a big purchase as a kitchen. Here is what I sent Karen and just two of the images I got back, there were lots showing the room from different angles.

My awesome haha (not even to scale) drawing *embarrassed face* :-)

thank you so much for sharin, sam. i am actually looking at this specific range myself! it seems to be very popular. your kitchen looks really beautiful and i really hope mine turns out like yours!

wow Sam N - the finished kitchen looks Fabulous! thanks for posting ! Sam had our D service option - with an annotated plan, rather than the A service with the full listing and panoramic etc. as you can see - its still more than possible to get quotes and a kitchen from the D service drawings.

Ooooo Jonathan, you've got me worried now. I planned and designed our kitchen and now I'm worrying that I may have made some of the bad/weird choices you mentioned ( and I've recently put photos up of our new kitchen) and I can't see them. :-/

FWIW I think that is an extortionate amount of money for a big shed kitchen and I wonder if the high installation charge was because they are trying to deter people from opting for their fitters because they're struggling with volumes and/or installers/fitters?