B&Q Kitchen fitting complaint

Hi everyone!

We ordered a kitchen from B&Q last January following a pre-fit survey. We later had our delivery date as 24th March 2010 and contractors employed by B&Q (DSP) would arrange and project manage the installation which would take 5 days starting on 29th March 2010. I will try to cut a very long and eventful story short; we went through 4 lots of fitters and an electrical contractor, had countless items reordered as they were not delivered or had been fitted when damaged/faulty, several meetings with B&Q, DSP and fitters, hundreds of telephone calls and emails later our kitchen was finally completed at the end of September 2010. Yes it took 6 months!

The house the kitchen was being fitted into was unoccupied as we had just bought it and were in the process of gutting it. No other tradesmen were allowed into the property during the installation as the DSP's first accusation when we had damaged items was that someone else must have done it, not them nor their fitter. We finally had the go ahead from B&Q to have our own tradesmen in the house in November 2010.

We had been due to move in last May but couldn't as the works were ongoing and with paying two mortgages & sets of bills for over a year we have not been able to afford to reschedule the works we delayed due to the kitchen fitting.

When the kitchen was finally finished we spoke to the DSP as several items in the room had been damaged. Namely our newly plastered walls, our brand new range cooker and cooker hood, our newly fitted windowsills, our new towel radiator and our newly laid quartz tiled floor.

Just after the kitchen was completed I went into hospital for a major operation. Then the phonecalls and visits started - contractors chasing us for money as B&Q hadn't paid them!

The DSP manager had wanted to come and check the project when finished so we contacted them to arrange this but to no avail. Eventually they called back and arranged for two of the managers to visit the house, our contact insisted that I attended the visit even though both myself & my husband had dealt with them in the past. The two managers came out in December 2010 and we stood in our freezing cold kitchen whilst they basically tried to patronise us and use bully tactics to convince us that we had our kitchen fitted what more did we want! They didn't look at the damage when we tried to point it out or check the quality of the fitment so we were lost as to the purpose of the visit.

The kitchen cost us almost £8,000 and over £2000 of that was the installation charge.

We were offered just over £600 in compensation for our inconvenience and damage to items then after us providing a list and costings of damaged items they have increased this to £1,500. We really don't know our rights and are not sure if this a good offer or not, what should we do???

Thank you for taking the time to read this and any advice xxx