Cooke & Lewis or DIY-Kitchens

tazman007 wrote: »

Hi all

First time post, long time lurker. Just looking for some opinions on the above. Having my kitchen done and it's down to the above two.

TBH, was set on going for the second nature kitchen from diy-kitchens.com priced at £3700 as have seen nothing but decent reviews about them. Equivalent cost for C&L came out at £4300. However just had a phone call from the designer saying due to sale or what not, this weekend, can bring the price down to £2800, which is a big drop.

Just wanted comments from people regarding quality of cabinets from both. Any opinions greatfully received

Cheers guys.

I have ben planning to do my kitchen for the last 9 months, will do it finally in April (Buy the stuff).
I have been debating with myself merit of buying all material and labour for Leccy and Tiling, or getting some one in to do the lot. One thing has not changed, I will buy units from diy-kitchens, second nature broadoak natural.

I went for DIY Kitchens in preference to C&L but you need to consider these points.

Second Nature Doors dont come with the holes drilled for the hinges. You can get a hinge rig from DIY- K for this but its £30 to hire plus post back charge or about £100 to buy. (see video on their site) I bought and it was very easy to use, but I was using wooden doors so I cant say how it would work on composite doors. Most of the cabinets have the same top to hole measurement. They will drill them for you at a 15% charge.

With C&L you will need end of run end panels, With DIY you have a large choice of cabinet colours and you can do without. Get samples from DIY to see how good the match is. This saved me over £600.

The edging of the cabinets was thicker on DIY but this may have changed.

You can opt for the much cheaper plinths in carcass colour to save cash over second nature plinths.

With DIY Kitchen you know were you stand on delivery dates, normally two weeks with the week commencing date shown on their web site but they only let you know the del date on the day before but phone on the day an hour before. And you may need to carry the items from the back of the lorrry if a one man drop as per the £75 del charge. My order was delivered by a two man team and they did all the carrying (tip given).
However the doors were delivered in advance separately without warning by a national deivery company.

DIY Kitchen work tops are I think 4 meters long - much too heavy for one person so I got these elsewhere.

The wall hanging fittings were very adjustable.

The only problem I had was on a L shaped courner wall unit. The suggested doors are too wide, they needed to be 270 and not 300 but second nature dont have these in their range so I had to reduce and paint edges.

Six months on no problems.