Supply only kitchen with many faults - small claims court?

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head

A_Geordie said:

I don't think they would take a dim view, I think most judges would be curious about the claim since it is likely to be a deviation from the usual claims they end up taking on. So long as it is clearly drafted and sufficiently articulated, I would think there's some leeway for litigants in person, and just because the outcome doesn't have the desired result, it can't be considered unreasonable or vexatious. I wouldn't say its a hopeless claim if that's what you're thinking.

Thanks for the reply, very interesting, I just wondered how the courts view such things, I wouldn't want to offer advice that could risk the rest of the claim being affected  

OP I echo the point above, if mentioning loss of enjoyment just mention no kitchen for Christmas. As above amounts generally aren't large and a kitchen will (should) last many years so the loss of enjoyment is minimal, whilst I appreciate you wish to air your grievances, labouring the point probably won't help.  

A_Geordie

@boots_babe The LBA is a good first attempt and generally nothing wrong with it. I've adapted what you've written to create something below with the use of sub-headings for easier signposting and omitted some things here and there. It's your dispute so feel free to use as much or as little as you want.

Some points to note:

1. In your LBA you referred to 'we' which suggests there is more than one claimant. Only the individual(s) who entered into the contract should be issuing the LBA and if that's yourself or soemone else, then you should use 'I' throughout. I am assuming there is only one contracting person since DIY Kitchens doesn't appear to allow more than one named person to place an order, but I could be wrong and I leave that to you to decide. If you get it wrong, you may be on the receiving end of wasted costs or having to spend more money making an application to amend the claim at your own expense. 

2. When listing out the losses and expenses, keep it short and brief e.g. £1,500 for costs relating to cancelling/re-arranging trades people. There were a couple of areas of the LBA where you went to explain or justify the expenses but it wasn't necessary to do that and I felt the way it was worded could be used against you. You only need to provide enough detail for DIY Kitchens to understand the claim against them and the receipts will be evidence of that. The detail comes later when you do your witness statement after proceedings have started.

3. As far as the disclosure of evidence, only provide th evidence that you intend to rely on in court to support your claim and the same applies to correspondence. Quite often, people submit hundreds of pages of correspondence as evidence but then only seek to rely on one or two emails. Please don't do that, and only provide the key correspondence you need because it wastes your time and money, the court's and your opponent's time reading unnecessary documents. In any event, DIY Kitchens should have copies of correspondence on their systems so if they want to review the rest of it, they should be able to. 

4. Never use bold to highlight certain words unless you are doing that as part of a defined word or phrase, it just screams unprofessional. Same goes for underlining words or using words that are all capitalised. Emphasis on words or phrases should be used in the rare instance, if any.

5. If you aren't aware already, DIY Kitchens is a trading name of Ultima Furniture Systems Ltd. If you have to issue legal proceedings against them then make sure the defendant name is Ultima Furniture Systems Ltd trading as DIY Kitchens. This should be reflected in your LBA too.

LETTER BEFORE ACTION

[CLAIMANT NAME] V [DEFENDANT NAME] 

Dear sir or madam,

This is a letter before claim written in accordance with the Practice Direction on Pre-Action Conduct and Protocols under the Civil Procedure Rules 1998 (the Practice Direction). In particular, I would draw your attention to paragraphs 13 to 16 of the Practice Direction, which state what sanctions the court may impose if you do not comply with the Practice Direction. 

Legal representation

It is my understanding that you are not legally represented. If you do have a legal representative, please provide me with your lawyer's details and also forward a copy of this letter to them.

Relevant facts

On 25th July 2024, 5th August 2024 and 10th August 2024 I placed orders with your DIY Kitchens for a supply-only kitchen totalling £20,027.27, comprising 114 kitchen unit items, plus additional fitting items. The reference numbers for these orders are [REFERENCE ORDER #1], [REFERENCE ORDER #2] and [REFERENCE ORDER #3] and they were due to be delivered on [INSER DATE(S)].

All three orders were delayed and did not arrive until [insert date(s)]. When I took delivery, I discovered that a significant number of items arrived damaged or defective. You agreed to replace the defective items but it turned out that a number of those replacements were also defective, which required you to make further arrangements to send additional replacement items. 

These issues have caused a significant delay in the installation of my kitchen and I have incurred various costs and expense as a result of the delays (as further described below), which was finally completed in January 2025 and [NUMBER] months late than anticipated.  

Basis of the claim

The Consumer Rights Act 2015 (the CRA) implies certain terms into the contract between myself and DIY Kitchens. Specifically, the CRA requires that the goods must be of satisfactory quality (section 9), fit for their intended purpose (section 10) and as described (section 11). A number of the goods supplied by DIY Kitchens, including replacement goods, were not of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose or as described.

The various breaches can be summarised as follows: 

Goods not of satisfactory quality
(i) 54 items required replacement due to damage or manufacturing defects;

(ii) of the 54 items, 9 of the replacements were also damaged or defective and required further replacements to be sent; and

(iii) 21 damaged items were retained to avoid further significant delays to the installation of the kitchen.

Goods not fit for purpose
I was charged for 3 glass drawer upgrades, but on installation found that only 2 drawers were compatible.

Missing items from original delivery
Six items were missing. There was significant wait for two of those items, and when they arrived, they were both faulty. The replacement items when they eventually arrived were also faulty.

Failure to collect damaged goods
DIY Kitchens failed to collect the remaining damaged items, despite explaining to me that the courier delivering the replacement goods would collect the damaged goods. On each occasion, the courier refused to collect the damaged items. The failure to collect the damaged items meant that for a period of [NUMBER] weeks I was left without any use of the ground floor. I then needed to dispose of the damaged items at my own expense since you refused to collect them.

Loss, damages and expense

The above-mentioned breaches by DIY Kitchens has caused me to suffer loss, damage and expense:

[itemise each of the losses, expenses etc.]

Evidence

I have enclosed documented evidence of:

• The original purchase confirmation emails
• An invoice from our fitter showing the additional costs incurred
• An invoice showing the additional skip hire costs
• Photos of each damaged item
• Copies of all key correspondence in relation to this dispute

Alternative Dispute Resolution

At this stage, I do not consider that alternative dispute resolution is appropriate. You will be aware that I have made numerous efforts to resolve this dispute on an informal basis, but it seems that we are too far apart on the sum of money to be agreed and I now feel the courts are best placed to deal with this matter.

Action required

In order to resolve this matter, I require DIY Kitchens to pay me the sum of [AMOUNT] in cleared funds no later than 4pm on [DATE]. Payment of the amount can be made to the following bank account: 

Bank: 

Sort Code: 

Account Number: 

If I do not hear back from you by the above-mentioned date, I shall have no other choice but to commence legal proceedings and without further notice to DIY Kitchens. It is likely that DIY Kitchen's liability will further increase as I will be seeking additional costs incidental to the claim such as application fees and interest at a rate the court sees fit. 

I look forward to hearing from you by [DATE].

Yours faithfully,

[NAME]

boots_babe

Alderbank said:

DIY Kitchens generally get very favourable reports on the various forums in MSE, examples such as 
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5897531/diy-kitchens/p1

They are very much at the 'bargain basement' end of the market; their principal boast is that their kitchen units are the cheapest available in the UK.

They give an example of a typical kitchen of 14 units from them costing about £2,000 (that's about £130 a unit) compared with the equivalent cost from Wickes of about £4,000 and Magnet of about £6,000 so they are about half or a third the price of high street competitors.

On that basis your order of 114 units costing twenty thousand pounds sounds humungous.

There are residences which could accommodate this many cabinets but their owners typically do not gut those kitchens to refit them from bargain basement retailers.
Can you confirm that this is just to refit your own domestic kitchen?
It's a pretty big order even for a large restaurant or hotel. It sounds to me like an order to renovate a block of BTL rental apartments. If so you are not really a 'consumer'.

If you are a consumer you are entitled to the £340 for a skip to dispose of faulty items as waste because CRA does expect the trader to bear the costs of collecting and disposing of faulty goods.

You say you have photos of the damaged items. Could you share some of the please?
I agree that as a consumer you would be entitled to the fitting costs of having those items 'unfitted' and replaced if the defect only became manifest after the item had been installed, such as a door closer or drawer runner which broke away from the carcase after a short period of use. But items that were clearly faulty on visual inspection, and that would include door colours or paint finishes which don't conform to contract, should not have been fitted. I don't think even a consumer can claim back the cost of fitting those.

Hi @alderbank,

I can completely understand why you're asking about the size of order, as I appreciate it is larger than the average order! It is for our own house, it split almost exactly cost-wise into around £10k for the kitchen and then £10k for the utility room. 

We have done an extension which houses a new kitchen space, and we have then turned what was our old dining room into a nice large utility room, so hopefully gives you some idea. We have extra tall height floor to ceiling units all around 3 walls of the ex-dining room/now-utility. Just one of the corner units for this cost £1500 + VAT, so you can see how it all adds up! From Magnet, who we actually later learned is somewhat inferior quality wise, their quote for the same setup was £65k.

Whilst you say they are 'bargain basement' that is only partly true. They are basement prices, as they manufacture a lot (not all) of their product themselves on site, so no middlemen, also no big chain of showrooms to incur overheads (they have 2 showrooms total).

We started out looking at German kitchens but we found that actually the quality of the materials used in DIYK is on a par with the low end German products. So it is basement price but definitely not basement quality.

I agree they get generally positive reviews. We have been a member of the dedicated DIYK user group on Facebook for well over a year now, as it's been a great resource for learning about pitfalls and how best to design your space. So I know that some people have damages, plenty of people have no damages, and that only a couple of others I have seen in all that time, have had issues on the scale we did. 

Whilst we have had horrendous issues that I would not wish on anyone, the actual finished units that we now have, once all the replacements were eventually sorted, are of great quality. Would we have gone with them had we known there would be so many issues? Probably not. 

But we have saved so much and the quality of the product we now have is good. What is not acceptable though is all the pain/delay/cost we had to go through to get to this point.

boots_babe

@Alderbank

A selection of photos of the damages as you requested. We had a whole array of issues, some items cracked, some bashed in on the edges or corners, lots of scratched paintwork.  We even had a couple of items with large black marker pen scrawled on them!!

We had some items where the packaging they had put on, they had taped with very strong tape, but they had taped the tape onto the actual paintwork and it was impossible to get off without damaging the paint, we did try everything. So much of the damage was clearly avoidable had it been (a) properly packaged and (b) gone through a proper quality inspection prior to despatch.

We did try to remedy marks such as the one in the first photo below, but on the whole most were not possible to fix and so we had to get replacements.

boots_babe

@A_Geordie - gosh thank you so much, for a stranger to take the time to help me at such a level of detail, is so kind. I'm really grateful.

Your version reads much better, and includes some helpful technical details. I did call CAB on Friday but they were honestly useless. The person I spoke with signposted the CRA which of course I was aware of, but when I asked which clauses were most relevant so that I could read up and reference them, he said 'none'. I said well surely some are, as you have said it falls under the CRA, but he just kept insisting it was just the 'general' CRA. I had some other questions too which he also couldn't help with, so I gave up in the end.

You have been far more helpful 

I'm aware thank you that they trade under the Utlima name. My drafted letter is addressed to them, and also had the order numbers in there, but I took them out to avoid any identifying details. 

I have not gone through small claims court before so do not know the process. I thought I should provide all relevant detail in the letter, but from what you've said there will be an opportunity to provide some sort of statement later in the process, so that is helpful to know.

I will make sure to post back to let you know how I get on, it's the least I can do after all the help.