The construction and quality of our Kitchens.
The Standard Kitchen cabinet box:
Every kitchen built for Dream Kitchens is built under the same strict quality control procedure.
We have listed the following information to differentiate our high standard of furniture compared to our competitors.
The "box" section used for the cabinet is the most important part of the furniture to determine whether your kitchen is ready for short or long term use. Get it wrong and the problems we constantly see such as - loose & bowed backs, sides parting from the bottom panel, drawers not gliding correctly, badly fitted shelves - are guaranteed to haunt you.
One of the largest faults often found on new kitchen units (as well as old) is loose or chipped edging tape. All our edging tapes are PVC, or ABS - which is one of the newer materials for edgebanding, ABS has some very attractive characteristics – it is both acid free and environmentally friendly under incineration. Both of these tapes are guaranteed never to chip. Check your proposed units, are they standard paper based melamine edges or PVC?
The strength of kitchen units are only as good as the board that’s used to make them and their method of construction. We only use 18mm board as supplied by one of the industry leaders, EGGER.
You might consider, that the 1 to 4mm extra thickness that our board is from other units may not seem important, but not only is our board the thickest available, but the centre core is extremely hard & dense, this leads to a stronger more durable carcase material, any fixings added such as screws for hinges and drawers, have a much more chance of staying rigid long term, so the working parts stay as they were designed to be - strong and attached to the panels.
Egger Eurodekor® has a density of 670kg per m3 and weighs in at 12.1kg per m2, this is the best you can get on the market.
We use Egger Eurodekor® board as they’re one of the few companies offering such a high quality dense material. This coupled with Egger’s ability to offer most of the exact colours that we require to colour co-ordinate the cabinet with the doors, ensures them to be the most obvious choice.
All the units are manufactured to the sizes we require, e.g a 350mm wide unit is exactly that, not a 500 or 400mm cut down. We can make your kitchen to the exact size you require, whether a height, width, or depth change - so unusual sizes aren′t a problem.
Assembly of Kitchen Units:
Our assembled rigid kitchens, are manufactured by hand, the joints are wooden dowels, glued together – NOT screws and pins, which can become loose, as offered by others. All the units, including tall larders and oven housings are squared, then squeezed under pressure, to enable tight (gap free) joints, then the doors and drawers are fitted. The only exception is on the very large corner units that are too large to get through the doorways fully assembled and have to be flattened due to their size and weight.
Whichever door you choose, whether it is; painted, vinyl wrapped, high gloss, solid timber, or covered with a fine veneer, you can be assured we continue to use only the best available materials - our aim is to offer you the most trouble free route we can find. Remember, if we don’t have to listen and deal with complaints caused by faulty products this gives us a stress free life.
In the construction of the units, only the best fittings and design have been used, whether your kitchen is in our cheaper or more expensive ranges, we use the same cabinet for both. It is the door style and complexity of drawer that increases or reduces the cost.
The Kitchen Drawer Boxes:
All the drawer boxes are supplied by 
BLUM, which is the recognised industry leader. Quality is the number one priority at Blum. Blum products are engineered for the lifetime of kitchen furniture - that’s approximately 20 years of problem-free function.
Click the video image (above left) to see the different storage options. Learn about the five kitchen zones and how your kitchen design can make the best use of these. Drawers have many more functions than just holding cutlery and pans. Look to see how you can use drawer management systems and hands free options to ensure the easiest use of your kitchen, with the maximum advantage in storage space. We can even supply drawers that open and shut electrically.
Our standard drawer box is the BLUM Tandembox integrated BLUMOTION drawer complete with the fully integrated soft-close drawer system, which catches the drawer in the last part of closing, provides a gentle and controlled ‘softened’ closure, it now makes drawer slamming a nuisance of the past.
SERVO-DRIVE for pull-out Kitchen Drawer Systems:
This is the ultimate electrical opening support system. Drawers and high fronted pull-outs open automatically using an electrical drive, with just a light touch on a handle-less front or a light pull of the handle - the drawer will open. This ensures silent and effortless closing thanks to BLUMOTION. Also this creates more freedom of motion as well as high opening comfort for any living area.
The Kitchen Cabinet Door Hinges:
All our door hinges are also supplied by BLUM. We use the luxury CLIP-ON hinge, to enable quick removal of the entire door without using any tools. These hinges have an added attachment to create soft-close kitchen doors and provide the most strongest, reliable door hanging, as well as also offering easy door removal with their clip-on, clip-off, system and soft-close.
The hinges are rigorously tested for wear and fatigue; including many hundred′s of thousands of opening/closing cycles and load and abuse testing to support their lifetime guarantee.
The Blum drawer and door systems work together in creating that SOFT-CLOSE environment. As with the drawers, all doors have the soft closures to make slamming a nuisance of the past - fitted as standard.
Handle-less 'Touch' control front fascia's in the Kitchen:
Handle-less front fascias are playing a greater and greater role in modern kitchen furniture design. We use the popular Blum TIP-ON (for drawers), this mechanical opening support system, gives true handle-less fronts for drawers, which can be opened easily with just a light touch. The Blum TIP-ON programme is the most effective system available. Equally we use Blum TIP-ON (for doors), again since no handles or bars are protruding, the stylish handle-less fronts give a smooth sleek design to your kitchen.
Packing & Delivery of Kitchen Units:
The completely ready-built units are clad in heavy duty protectors and completely wrapped in plastic wrap. Your whole order is collated by the assembly team, then after a mutually agreed, convenient delivery time, delivered to you direct, (of course if we are installing, with us there to unload as well). Throughout, this stringent quality control procedure helps ensure that every kitchen unit arrives to you, in only the best condition.
Our Furniture Sales against the Aggressive Kitchen Sellers:
We are not an aggressive selling company and do not sell kitchens by forcing a high pressure salesman onto our customers. We do not have ‘High-low’ pricing strategies, as we prefer not to insult the intelligence of our customers by offering kitchens at an outrageously high price and then reducing it by 50 to 75% to give you a so called ‘special offer’ you can’t refuse. If you did more research, you would find it is still a well over inflated price even when reduced. Please read this link Q&A number 14 These companies are not charities, although you might think so with their sales pitch, they are multi-million pound companies after your money for a larger profit - don't make the mistake of being conned with massive discounts and so called ‘free’ appliances, even if it is at present a legal loophole.
The UK government (as at 2012) has hinted that they wish to stop this aggressive selling, but until the law is changed some companies still insist on using this technique, two of the largest companies are advertising on television in prime time hours and are household names. These companies will not give you a bargain, they just use selling techniques to make you think you have gained one! Every day another mug joins the queue for a so called ‘bargain’ that does't exist.
Our Furniture against the Cheaper Alternatives:
All our bespoke cabinets are rigid in construction, have factory fitted glued joints, are set square by machine and give a perfect fit. They are specially designed to your requirements in any size, unlike a kitchen made from flatpack units, only available in set standard sizes, which are assembled by screws, dowels and cams. With flatpack, the builder assembles them either in your house or garden. Also in many cases, assembly is carried out in a builders or fitters garage prior to the visit, so that the kitchen is delivered to you looking more superior than its original DIY "flat-pack" box it came in. Try to climb on an assembled flatpack unit standing in the middle of the floor, it will most likely collapse. A true "rigid" unit would stay as it says RIGID - with NO flexing as it is a solid box.
Don’t buy your kitchen at face value, check out the manufacturer of the internal parts such as hinges and drawers. There are a lot of "cheaper" products imitating Blum, but the quality isn’t anywhere near comparable - despite looking similar.
It seems to be common practice for the DIY stores selling cheap kitchens to inflate the installation charge to fit their cheap units! Our overall quote may be similarly priced, but our installation charge is always considerably lower than the "sheds," so that your hard earnt investment goes into a far better quality product rather than fitting charges.
Summary:
If you buy a better quality unit in the first place - already fully factory assembled, you don’t need to add the extra labour in putting the flat-pack together. The other major mistake is thinking that as you have paid more it must be a quality kitchen - when it is clearly not! Yes it is a mine-field out there, but a little reality thinking is better than throwing your money to company shareholders or fitters with inflated prices.
Although kitchens from large DIY outlets may end up around the same price, you will often get far more value for your money from independent outlets, as you are offered better quality kitchen products for a similar overall fitted price. As they are of a superior quality they are easier and quicker to fit, requiring less labour and last far more years of rough treatment. Labour can cost more than the item being fitted, so we try and keep this to a minimum.
On our lower to mid end kitchen door ranges, several times we have matched the DIY stores, despite having a vastly superior product, we win on the installation costs.
Remember if you pay cheap it most likely is cheap - cheap rubbish! You will be surprised how a little extra money spent on your furniture can give you a vast difference in quality. The expression "You get what you pay for" isn’t always true, but it is a good guide 98% of the time.
