Kitchen
Secret #5
Should you tell
your designer your kitchen budget?
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 kitchen 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 kitchen 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 kitchen 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!
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