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  • Having lived with my kitchen which someone DIY installed... I would say that cabinets are not the worry or concern.

    The concern is whether you've got your electrics right, whether your plumbing is done right, whether your boiler is accessible and serviceable (including filters, taps, plumbing around them), whether it all makes sense as a total thing, i.e. I have sockets beneath a sink, and individually I'm sure this is fine to reason about but when the sink waste trap failed and leaked it shorted all of the electrics, and as those weren't isolated properly it took out a couple of things with it.

    The cabinets seem to be the smallest problem, and I feel up to buying and fitting either ready-mades or carcasses... the thing I wish whomever had done my kitchen had done, is simply to engage decent trades to strip the kitchen down, put in a decent and clean plumbing and electrics, and then make good the empty kitchen before cabinets had gone in.

    So yes... you can do it, but don't scrimp on the trades to get a solid foundation from which you work from. Designing the layout and cutting a cabinet shell to accommodate the layout of the plumbing and electrics is far better than trying to fit the plumbing and electrics to your cabinet layout.

  • I'm fairly comfortable with the plumbing side of it, and where to locate utilities

    (Boiler / washing machine etc... are in a separate room, so not an issue, luckily - other than making sure that I have inspection hatches)

    The main problem I have at the moment is usability - The kitchen was designed by someone that apparently never used a kitchen. Sure - it looks pretty, but it's a pain when you have more than one person dong anything.

    The real fun is going to be re-plumbing a radiator and installing underfloor heating in a solid concrete floor. Disruption time!

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