If you don’t like the heat…..

We have an allowance of $20k in the build cost for the kitchen but unfortunately the price came in at $27k (everything expect appliances – we already have those from pre-renovation). We spent about 3 weeks looking at alternative products/materials to bring the cost down but in the end stayed with the original plan for a couple of reasons.

1.       The tall cupboards, which are a major feature of the open plan living area, were to be made of Navlam veneer (sandblasted brindle oak). This is a sheet product, not a panel, so need to be attached to a panel and so labour costs are triple that of say polyurathene. We are having white poly on the island and really wanted a timber type veneer on the other cupboards but were a bit picky and so could not find a panel product we liked (i.e. Laminex). A lot of the options are very knotty and we wanted smooth grain and I liked the rough texture created by the sandblasting.

 

2.       We could have saved a bit ($1.5k) using Naturastone as opposed to Caeserstone but we would have to coordinate the different trades/businesses to work together and if the result was crap it would be our responsibility, not the builder/joiner, therefore we took the easy/safer/more expensive route and stuck with Caeserstone.

3. We wanted good quality runners (soft close and fully extendable)

Kitchen plan - a few changes since this but close enough to what we will have

Trevor and I are meeting with the joiner on site in about a week to go through some finer details and then he will start producing the kitchen and expects it to be ready in 4-6 weeks.

Other materials in kitchen are a stainless steel bench (in tall cupboard area) and mirrored splashback. Light will be downlights in ceiling, 2 x under cupboard and a 3000mm magazine wire suspended light.

Even though the kitchen is costing more than we hoped, we believe that it will be money well spent as we plan on staying in the house for 20 years.