Does anyone have any views on which kitchen units are the best, in terms of value for money, robustness etc etc. I haven't done a kitchen for approx 15 years and things have changed somewhat, in the past I used MFI and found them satisfactory, however things have moved on and I was thinking to use B&Q as superficially they seemed good value. MFI and Focus seemed expensive? What does the team think? Any recommendations appreciated. Regards Tom
Was looking at this subject myself recently, I thought B&Q were quite expensive, even with their half-price doors offers.IKEA are much cheaper than they used to be - so much so that they were the best on price I thought. Worth taking a look.
Of course **if** you can get an account with them, Howdens are hard to beat....
FWIW we're buying an ALNO kitchen from (and fitted by) John Lewis. IMHO far better VFM than any of IKEA/MFI/B+Q/Kitchens Direct/Stoneham. This is based on; my parent's IKEA kitchens, the Kitchen Direct units that I ripped out of my kitchen, looking at the 'sheds' offerings before visiting ALNO and my mother in law's Stoneham kitchen.
Very flexible design options.
This is intended to be a 'fit and forget' kitchen. My father thinks that IKEA scores over the MFI types in terms of price, but it doesn't seem to be very durable.
HTH Richard
The top end MFI are ok. I was pleasantly impressed by a B&Q kitchen fitted by a friend recently and they have the advantage you can get and fit it the same day unlike MFI where you have to wait weeks for delivery of yr order and there is always something missing/broken although cust services are quite helpful. OR the dreaded Ikea who never have everything you want in stock, even if you check before you travel there..
Suggest you google the group for a thread I kicked off recently entitled Would you buy another kitchen from Wickes?
Ikea I thought were absolute shit, no service chanell behind the cupboards, no way to true them up to the wall, unusually for ikea stuff I found the general quality dreadful.
Thanks for that, the previous thread makes interesting reading including the telephone abuse you received, however I'm still not sure which to go for. It's a small kitchen so I may go and pick some units from B&Q and fetch them home myself.
I did that recently with 4 small 300mm units to make bases for shelf units (nothing to do with kitchen) and found the construction was fine, similar to the MFI units I built years ago but they used to stock them in MFI in those days, Ahh well, happy days. Things don't seem to have changed a lot in construction terms except the drawers which seem to be made of bent mild steel and look a much better and stronger design than the old ones. Thank you all for your comments, much appreciated, Will try and get a catalogue from ALNO before deciding, I don't think I'll go down the IKEA road. Cheers Tom
I'm sure the John Lewis/ALNO ones are better quality. However, I'd suspect you are talking 2-4 times the price of IKEA and that's quite a trade off. I managed to get round 6 suppliers in one day last week and the one supplier that I felt I could exclude immediately was MFI. Their expensive ones looked OK, but then you are in the John Lewis/custom made bracket, but I thought the Hygena range build quality, in particular the drawers was the lowest of all I looked at (Ikea/MFI/B&Q/Wickes/Homebase and local custom build place) and they aren't even particularly cheap. I thought Wickes were probably ahead on build quality (excluding the custom kitchen place) but that Ikea was not far short and a lot cheaper, though I'd probably be happy with B&Q or Homebase. I've seen several remarks about Ikea units having problems with space behind, but I'm not too worried about that as it's going into a completely refurbished space, and we can ensure it's not needed. We're not ready to buy/order yet and I expect the final decision will rest on what offers the various suppliers have on the type we want when the moment comes, but it won't be MFI (even though I have no complaints about my current 24 year old Hygena kitchen, but that's a different thing altogether from what they call Hygena now).
Peter
I'm happy with my MFI units. They were just about identical in price and quality to B&Q units, but had a far wider range of styles. B&Q only had around 10, and only 2 of those were real wood fronts. They mostly concentrate on cheap modern MDF designs. I don't know what you mean about the drawer units. Perhaps the display had the "standard" runners rather than the proper "deluxe" ones.
I fitted some B&Q ones for my parents around the same time, and there was nothing to choose between them in terms of quality, apart from the B&Q door buffers, which can be easily fitted to the MFI units.
Christian.
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