New kitchen advice please anyone.

I wish I had a large enough kitchen to have an eye level oven, drawers instead of cupboards and an island.

In retrospect we should have knocked the wall down and had a kitchen diner, but it was 24 years ago, when we moved in and we wanted a separate room.

We used DIY Kitchens and we cannot praise them too highly.

I agree have drawers below your worktop, not cupboards. I have a big pullout waste centre with 4 waste containers in two sizes 1) food waste (animal protein), 2) vegetable food wast for composting. 3) recyclables (our council doesn't require any sorting, all recyclables go in the same bin 4) Stuff for black bin.

If you have room think about a bin store cupboard - ours has two large bins inside and is one if the best features of the kitchen! We had plain black granite worktops - the kitchen is about 6 years old and the worktops still look like new. Do your homework too, our kitchen was custom built by a local kitchen company based in the village - the units were solid wood and far superior to Wren, Wilkes, B and Q - yet their quote was only about £2,000 more than the large kitchen companies, despite the difference in quality. Also, the after sales care was superb.

Oh how exciting! ? Make a list of the things that are important to you. We closed off a doorway so that we could have floor to ceiling units across one whole wall and opted not to have wall hung units to avoid the kitchen feeling closed in and knocked down the wall between kitchen and dining room for a more usable space.
We’ve gone for integrated units and gloss handle less so that they are easy to wipe down. Whilst I love the cottage kitchen design, I don’t want to spend my life forever cleaning so this works for us. We have Amtico flooring which runs through kitchen, dining room and hallway.
The kitchen is definitely the worse room to get done and I had a makeshift kitchen in a bedroom and washed up dishes etc in the bath for about a month whilst this work was going on.
We opted for granite worktops and wall stands including window cills in the kitchen. I love them, don’t get me wrong, but in hindsight, wish I had opted for a light colour rather than black with bronze flecks in.

I would have loved to have had a Quooker but we live in a very hard water area so probably wouldn’t have been practical.
Having said that, we did spend (to us anyway) a horrendous amount of money but our bungalow was VERY dated (think 1960s/1970s) and had not been lived in for over a year and it was the first (and only) time I had ever had a new kitchen.

One thing I would say is that quite often there are so called ‘deals’ on kitchen appliances. I didn’t want those and opted to research and choose the ones I wanted. I was then able to negotiate a deal when I came to purchase them.
Good luck x

If you have room, a walk in larder is fabulous. I had one before, but don't have space now, so I have a larder unit with pull out drawers in my new kitchen and love it to bits. It's only 50cm wide, but holds so much, and it's so easy to find everything.

On a similar note, drawers rather than cupboards wherever possible.

If you don't need them, I'd do without wall cupboards, but that's mainly personal choice as a very short person, plus I think they make kitchens look smaller.

As a short person, when we finally choose our final house, I will have one area of lowered work surface, as I find, for example, rubbing in for pastry, or mixing things in large bowls and such like quite difficult on a normal height one.

Double, or at least 1.5, sinks are very useful if you have space.

Get lots of people to come round and design things with you, and then go to somewhere like DIY Kitchens and buy it for a quarter the price. You can show them a design and they will tell you what to buy, and it's all done online.

Get a really really good fitter, because that's what makes real difference to how it looks and works.

Alternatively, get a local independent company to work with on the whole process.

I have a Quooker boiling water tap, and a built-in Neff Slide & Hide oven (along with a built-in Neff microwave with grill) and like them all! The tap, particularly, I wouldn't want to be without now.

I really wish I'd had one of those pull out, bendy, extendable taps like they have in commercial kitchens. My friend has one and they're ace for rinsing dishes and getting round the edges of the sink.