which flatpack?

Dear Forum,

in the process of planning new, custom-design home. Planning on DIY flatpack kitchen to save some money - mainly base cabinets, mostly with drawers (good quality, metal sided). I'd like a country kitchen with timber doors & drawer front and have sufficient woodworking skills to make those myself (most likely from standard size pine & pine lining boards).
My question: which company to buy the flatpacks from, and importantly, which one to stay away from? I've looked at catalogues from Ikea, Bunnings (standard drawers are not great) and Nover. Has anybody done something like this and might be able to offer some comments, opinions or advice?

thanks !!

er, where are you? Might be wise to look at sourcing from your own State otherwise transport costs will come into play.

barkly

PS If Victoria I cannot recommend highly enough Plyboard Industries at Dandenong and Blum drawer hardware both of which I used and am delighted with the result.

Have you considered ordering your kitchen from a cabinet maker or board cutting service. All comes completly flat pack so you can put it together.

Best thing is you dont have to work with standard cabinet sizes or the poor drawer systems that alot of flat packs come with. This way you can specify the exact sizes to the millermeter and have what ever combination of doors or drawers you want!

Have almost finished my own make over of my kitchen using flatpacks. They came from cabinetsondemand.com.au, which is the online arm of a Canberra based kitchen company. They have interstate 'offices' too, I assume these are local businesses associated with Cabinets on demand.

Overall the process was pretty good, the quality of what they deliver was top notch. The hinge and drawer hardware they use is Heitich and the door and panel finish is more or less anthing you like, at a cost though.

The only gotcha's is you need to know everything you plan to order and their exact sizes, this is because for them there is no such thing as a standard size. I used autocad to design my kitchen to the mm, which was handy as I could then easily see what sized fillers etc I needed. My kitchen had a full double axle trailers worth of parts. Only took about 3 days to assemble the cabinets and get them in.

What took more time that I expected are the little finishing touches, such as tiling and plaster work. Also not helped by the long lead time I had for fitting of Ceasarstone bench tops. The company that did that wouldn't work off my plans (which is a good thing), so had to come out once the cabinets were in to measure then it took 4 weeks for fitting due to them being exceptionally busy. Well worth the wait though.

The only issue I had was damage to one door, which I did myself. I emailed the company to see how difficult it would be to replace and received no reply and calling I was told it was not worth their while as they would have to order new board etc. In the end I found out, not through them might I add that Polytech who was my laminate maker sell panels and doors cut to size. So $60 later I had a new door. Only thing I had to do was put on the hinge holes, which was quite easy using the original door as a template. Would still recommend them though provided you know what you are doing and accept if things go wrong there isn't much they can do to help.

Cost wise I think it ended up being a little more expensive than Bunnings, Ikea etc, but for custom fit it was well worth the cost.

I have a thread that I started when I first started planning. Hopefully in the next few days I can post some pics of my almost finished kitchen. Christmas eve is the deadline the missus as demanded, should be ok as all that is left to do is some final painting and touch ups. The link is here:

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=51042

I recently went to check out the kitchens at Masters (Harrington Park) and was very impressed with the quality. The attitude and commitment of the sales team was a real eye opener. Bunnings will need a lot of catching up to do to get any where near them.