Custom Made Kitchens (Investment) vs Flat Pack Kitchens (Expense)

The single most difference between a beautiful looking kitchen and an average or poor looking kitchen is the way it is installed. A cheap kitchen but professionally installed, looks a lot better than the most expensive kitchen not installed by a professional. Kitchen installation is one of the hardest and the most technical trade, and professional go through a lot of training & experience before calling themselves a good kitchen installers. A lot of flat pack companies make the kitchen installation sound very easy and non-technical, but obviously all they care about is selling you with a kitchen, regardless of whether it will suit your situation or not. Unless you are extremely confident, always try to choose a company that installs their own kitchen. Trust me you will win in the end.

Like anything else and as the old saying reads “You get what you pay for”. Kitchens are probably one of the best examples where it is so true that the cheapest kitchen is only going to get you more troubles. Most of the companies selling flat-pack kitchens, import either the whole cabinets in a box or just the doors & panels from overseas with really low standards of materials used to manufacture. You will probably find a lot of the materials chipped as you are taking it out of the box and by the time you finish the installation the kitchen will be looking few years old already.

Flat pack kitchens are significantly cheap at the start, however invariably everyone who has done it have experienced that the kitchen renovation project has costed them a lot more then what was originally thought and in most cases more than a lot of custom made kitchens, however they are still left with an inferior product which would only last 5-8 years, compared to 20-30 years of life for an custom made kitchen.

The biggest advantage of going with a custom made kitchen, is you can design and create your kitchen scratch. Every individual is different and it may look easy to live in a kitchen that was designed and mass produced overseas, but as you start using it, you will find that the design is not exactly how you would have wanted it. One of the things that sets apart a custom made kitchen, is you don’t have to have un necessary fillers/in-fills as the kitchen will be produced to suit your house.

A Custom made kitchen will very easily over last a flat pack kitchen by 2-3 times. As a thumb rule, a flat-pack kitchen would last 5-8 years and starts to age by lots of chips and scratched in months and sometimes even while you are taking it out of the box.

All flat-pack kitchens have a manufacturer, re-seller and an installer. Technically speaking, your warranty with the manufacture or the re-seller is with the product while it is in the box and sitting in a shelf, as soon as it has been installed your workmanship warranty is with that installer. If you every face an issue with the kitchen you will find that the installer and the re-seller are playing ball games and no one will take the ownership, and in some cases the installer might not even be contactable and then you are stuck with what you have.