KITCHEN SECRET 5:

Why does a designer need a budget - and is it good to tell him?

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!

See Kitchen Secret 6.