| So
how much do want to spend on your kitchen?
Should you
tell your designer exactly how much you want to spend? If you
do, does that mean that you’ll be throwing some of your
hard earned money down a ‘black hole’?!
Obviously unless you’ve got more money than sense, you don’t
want to pay over the odds for your kitchen...
However, looking
at it from the designer’s perspective, he knows that if
the price isn’t ‘right’, you won’t buy
the kitchen. Looking at it from his point of view, what’s
the point in spending a few hours designing a luxury kitchen for
you if you’re just going to sit back and laugh when the
price is presented? From some designer’s perspective, there’s
no point in continuing to design you a kitchen if you won’t
agree to a budget for the project.
The
problem is, is that from the customer’s perspective there
is a conflict of interest here.
 Looking
at it from a customer’s viewpoint, the designer might just
have ‘dollar signs’ in his eyes. If they give the
designer their actual budget, then if the real price of the kitchen
is less than that, how are they to know that the price presented
to them won’t have ‘magically increased’ to
hit their budget? The actual reality is that it probably won’t
affect the final price you pay for your kitchen. Probably? Yes,
I’m afraid that you will have to judge ‘value for
money’ to a certain extent by yourself.
What a designer
is doing is putting himself in a position where he has a good
opportunity to make a sale. At the end of the market demonstration,
(See a later Kitchen Secret) the designer might say to you something
like...
“If I
could prove to you that we offer this quality kitchen in this
kind of price bracket would you be happy?”
If you are
happy with that, then his next question might be...
“Obviously
I can design you a kitchen at various pricing levels depending
upon lots of factors – it’s my job to come up with
a design that you’d be happy with at a price that you’d
be happy with”.
Now
the designer might tell a big fat lie…
“I
get paid for every appointment whether someone buys the kitchen
or not – so I don’t mind about that. But it’s
my job to make sure that I try and not go too much over your budget
– everyone has one – so what kind of level were you
thinking of before hand?”
If that doesn’t
work, then the designer might try and get a budget from you via
a ‘finance demonstration’. (Refer to later on in Kitchen
Secrets). At the end of the finance demonstration, the designer
might say...
“Most
people find that they spend between £25 and £30 a
week on their kitchen – is that a level you’d be happy
with?”
Unknowingly,
upon answering yes, you’ve just given the designer your
budget.
Everybody
is happy buying a kitchen at the price that is right for them,
but everybody has a different price expectancy level.
If
the price isn’t right for you, you won’t buy.
The secret
is, is to get the designer to design a kitchen that you’re
happy with, at a price level that you’re happy with, at
good value compared with the rest of the marketplace. Throughout
the whole presentation, the designer is trying to analyse the
kind of price level that you’d be happy with, how much more
you’ll be willing to pay for something that you consider
to be ‘special’ and ‘different’ and at
what price level you’d accept as being ‘believable’.
From our experience
at Kitchen Secrets, we’d suggest for you to do some approximate
‘pricing up’ in Home Improvement stores before the
kitchen designer comes round. This will give you a good idea of
cabinet costs. They will also give you an approximate fitting
cost. Then you should research what kind of appliances you wish.
Add up the value of your total requirements. Then subtract 10%.
That’s the budget we’d suggest for you to give. But
don’t say where you got the figure from – just say
that’s what you were thinking of spending!
©
Copyright 2003, 2004, 2005 Kitchen-Secrets.com. All Rights Reserved.
Contact
Us Disclaimer
Links
Add link
|
