If you can't stand the heat...

...stay away from trying to commission a kitchen, as the saying goes. This is the big area which doesn't quite have a tick in the box yet. Not because we don't know what we want! But there are some contributory factors. Firstly, as is the way when you know exactly what you want, you can't quite get exactly what we want from any of the kitchen providers we've found so far. Secondly, and more interestingly, we have a range of quotes for the units which vary from under £3K to over £13K, which are all basically for similar construction decent quality non-flat-pack painted wooden shaker-style units. There are some frills - some are oak and some are just 'wood' - but the cheapest is oak and as far as I can see literally the identical units to one of the more expensive ones. The worktop quotes vary by a similar factor - but the expensive worktops aren't matched with the expensive cupboards, of course. So now I'm going through the process of trying to get genuinely matching quotes, and it's proving ticklish. I was amused yesterday talking to Peter the Architect when he said we needed this complete so that the builder could calculate his margin:'He needs to know if it's £40K or £15K'... I pointed out that a) our error bars were narrow and b) all were set below his bottom level... This is what one of the suppliers thinks it will look like: