almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea

*nods*

they seemed very good - and the quote covered fitting and replumbing the washing machine/dishwasher too, as well as sorting out the laminate flooring. I was expecting it to be more than 拢x, but not quite 拢2x. More like 拢1.5x - you've seen the size of our kitchen, it's hardly small...

ah well. We also need to get a new window fitted.

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myfirstkitchen.livejournal.com

With kitchens and bathrooms you always pay as much if not double or more for the fitting as the things. You're better off finding mates who are a bit handy and lobbing them a bit of cash plus beer and pizza. Flooring, replumbing the appliances etc are all things you can do yourself given a long weekend.

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Flooring, replumbing the appliances etc are all things you can do yourself given a long weekend.

I laid the floor that's in there now. I'd happily pay someone else to do it this time. :-)

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helflaed.livejournal.com

I'd agree with you on floor laying (especially if tiles are involved- vinyl is OK) as it took two professional tilers about a week to get my kitchen floor level and tiled. I fitted my IKEA kitchen myself with the exception of plumbing in the sink and fitting the worktops. I was amazed how cheap the kitchen was.

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Good luck old chap! We are at loggerheads with our bathroom company. The gas boiler man was great, the plumber was great, the electrician was lazy but competent, the plasterer smelled like a ferret, but accomplished his tasks adequately and the joiner seemed to own only a tenon saw and a hammer. Not so hot on T-squares, inchtapes, planes, sandpaper, heck, even seemed not to own a stanley knife. Terribly pleasant, but completely vacant between the ears. So we are now into month five of scrappy walled, wonky skirting, skew-whiff door frame, raggy window silled hell, for which we are not paying until it is fixed thankyouverymuch. We have even paid for an internet search of the company directors. This means war!

So, yes, as I was saying, good luck with that!

Meanshile, we have bare walls and floors, a door that sticks, and a mouse run behind the skirting, with a mouse called Russell, because he does...

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luckily we have some friends who also used this lot to fit the kitchen, and the nice B&Q man said that if we wanted, we could use the fitters who did theirs.

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Ah, much safer to have a personal recommendation, we were trying to go a bit cheaper than our friends' recommendations, and what a mistake that was, expensive fittings + cheapo labour = bad decision.

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Just a word of warning.

By all means buy the kitchen stuff from B&Q but what ever you do, DO. NOT. PAY. THEM. TO. INSTALL. IT!

We did that with our bathroom about 6 or 7 years ago and it was AWFUL! It was a bunch of cowboys who made a right god awful mess of the job. We spent a year trying to get them and B&Q to put it right.

It's still not the way we wanted it, we still have issues with tiling and the taps on the sink.

I know that it's been quite a few years between now and then and that every place is different but I for one would never ever pay them to send guys out to install anything.

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We had some friends locally use them and had no problems - I guess there are good and bad teams out there. Luckily the guy who was out last night said that if we specified, we could get the same lot who installed our friends' kitchen

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That's good news!

I wish we'd had some good guys install ours it would have been a nice bathroom.

We need a new kitchen too (someone on a bad acid trip installed ours) don't know what we are going to do about it.

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See above for similar tale of woe. I did want a new kitchen, but now am seeing the wisdom of letting it crawl on to its inevitable death, say ten years in the future, when, with luck, I shall be looking back on the present bathroom debacle and laughing about it. Am really not seeing the funny side of no sodding floor, covered with a tottering patchwork of old lino held together with parcel tape.

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Geeez! Whos that so I can avoid them as well?

All we wanted was tiling, sink, loo and tub installed. They never plastered the walls but used tile cement to fill in the holes that appeared when they took the old tiles off. They didn't fill the bath before they sealed it so all that popped off first time I had a bath...

The list goes on and on.

Far as our kitchen goes well it was dead before I moved in I have a zombie kitchen :P

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A small local firm, so you'll never likely encounter them. The litany of bathroom woe is long. Particularly good is the tale of how the chap knocked right through to the hall when hammering the gyproc onto the wall. We're talking a head sized hole, in my hall, my nicely decorated did-it-myself hall, in super-pricey heritage colour paint. Which they had better repair invisibly, or they can absorb the cost of doing it again, until I am satisfied. Or, they didn't follow our carefully measured plan, so it didn't fit, or rather, the door wouldn't close, so they had to shave an inch of either side of the door, a victorian door, mark you, with predictable results - a great big pile of un-morticed door parts. And the failure to order the right shower door, or to fit the panels correctly. sometime, when they finally do get the right shower door, the whole damn thing will have to come out, and then go back in, only this time properly. And let us not speak of them flooding my downstairs neighbour, and failing to accept liability until some very carefully worded letters were sent.

My kitchen was already moribund 19 years ago when I moved in. The smaller of the double oven has never worked, nor has the grill, and the drain pipes are held together by a huge bandage of duck tape. The sink burps horribly and I put my foot through the floor about ten years ago. I poured quick set cement into the hole, seemingly endlessly. There is still a trench by the fridge. The floorboards undulate gently, like the south downs.

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My word! I'm speechless! O.o

My kitchen I swear was fitted out in the late 70's and it had to be done by someone on a very bad acid trip.

There is ONE drawer in the whole of the kitchen, which is unusable due to it always hitting the cooker. Both under counter cupboards are very deep but the very back of the cupboards is inaccessible due to the doors hitting the cooker and the washing machine.

And now there is a fault in the electrics on one way knocking out 3 of the 5 working sockets. Which means they are going to knock a hole in the wall to reach the wires to fix the problem, which could actually be anywhere in the wall.

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OMG, that reminds me of a flatshare I had once. The drawer stuck, or so I thought, so I put my whole weight into un-sticking it, to discover it was a false front, and no drawer. I had to whack it back into place using the heel of my most sensible pair of shoes.

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