I fitted my own kitchen... twice – here's why I doubt I'll do it again

Renovating houses is an expensive business, with the average kitchen costing anywhere between £10,000 and £35,000+. When it came to sorting out my own kitchen in two different houses, I tried to look for ways to stick to our budget for both home improvement projects and that involved fitting my own kitchen.

My first house was a mid-century cottage that hadn’t been touched since the early seventies, if the various shades and patterns of brown wallpaper, carpets and curtains were anything to go by. Alongside the cost of a new kitchen, the whole place needed remodelling. We only had our savings to work with, so we chose DIY Kitchens to supply our kitchen.

The process is simple enough; you use their online design planner, providing your own measurements and preferences, and they send fully built units. I loved learning how to design a kitchen myself, and we achieved a better quality and layout flow by doing it ourselves. You also have the choice to either fit the kitchen yourself or pay an installer. This first time around, we compromised: we fit the units but got a carpenter in to fit the oak worktops.

Our second project is a stone cottage with a 70s extension. This time, filled with confidence from the time before my partner and I did everything ourselves, including building a pantry. Although we love the outcome and are so proud we’ve been able to take on every step, some things would make me pause before going through the whole endeavour and fitting our own kitchen again.

If you're considering fitting your own kitchen to save a bob or two, here are some of the reasons I came to rethink it, and you should consider too.

1. The entire design was down to me, including measurements and any issues

They say to measure twice and cut once. Well, when you’re spending £5,000 on kitchen units that are made to measure, it really, really pays to measure 20 times, check and recheck another 20 times. Our walls are not straight, to say the least and they don’t just wobble horizontally, but also vertically so depending on where on the wall you measure you could get a number of different outcomes.

Although this was fine in our first kitchen because it was very much a units in-units out situation, we were very up in the air about the more recent project about how much would be added on by plastering, the pantry being built, the wall coming out and so on. It wasn’t until quite late on that we had the measurements 100% and even then I ordered a wine rack just on the off-chance we had a spare 150mm.

2. The extra admin was a nightmare

While fitting the kitchen ourselves meant we could splurge on worktops, taps and where to buy kitchen tiles. However, I've now realised there’s a reason why people buy the units, worktops, handles, taps and even lights and furnishings from the same kitchen suppliers: it’s much less faff.

The hubris of two full-time workers with a whole renovation going on around them, taking time and mental effort to spend hours trolling websites for the best deals on incredibly similar fixtures, is funny to me now. For a good three months, we had no handles or wall lights simply because we didn't have the time or mental capacity to make decent decisions.

If you are equally stuck right now Pooky has a very good summer sale on, so I'd act fast if you want to include one of their lights in your design.

3. It took forever to finish and it’s still not done!

I’m going to preface this with a caveat that we have been doing other things elsewhere in the house alongside the kitchen, and my partner had been away for some of this time, but our units arrived mid-January, and we’re still not finished. The actual time it took to install the kitchen - meaning fitting the units and installing the worktop, appliances and sink - was about 5 days split over two weekends.

We’re so used to making do without what we now consider to be luxuries, like an extractor fan cover, splashback and the island that my partner wants to build himself, that we don’t even think twice about any of it. The pantry doors have only just gone on because of - surprise, surprise - a measuring mix-up, and in the meantime, we have lost the handles somewhere in our mess of a renovation. It’s only when people come to visit that we become distinctly aware of our unfinished dream kitchen.

To be honest, I would wholeheartedly recommend fitting your kitchen if that’s your only focus or if you're more organised than we are. We love that we’ve had our fingerprints on every step of the process, and we saved money in the long run, but I’m hoping for our next project, we’re finally at the stage of adulthood that we can let someone else take on the messy work and get a finished kitchen in a much more timely fashion!