The Kitchen Man

Unlike our previous home, which was a new build, the "new" place is almost 100 years old and consequently in need of some refurbishment especially in the bathroom and kitchen. Before we moved in, we'd assumed the kitchen would be the first priority. It's long and relatively narrow and has hardly any counter space apart from a couple of feet beside the sink. It has a very old decrepit boiler, a butcher's block table we bought with the house and pretty much nothing else, apart from two cavernous Edwardian cupboards that stretch up on each side of the chimney breast - just like the ones my Grandma had in the back room of her Victorian terrace.

We had several ideas about what to do with the space, and had arranged for a local firm to visit to do the detailed design and give us a quote. With appalling planning the kitchen man was due to call on the afternoon of our last day at the Great Orme, which accounts for us having to curtail our walk around Bodnant Gardens.

Even so, we were very excited by the design he drew up. He listened carefully to all our ideas, supplemented them with some of his own and came up with a fabulous plan that turned the kitchen into a modern living space with plenty of room and some wow factor. But oh dear! As soon as the design phase of his visit was complete, someone flicked a switch in his head and he turned into Salesman of the Century. Worse. Double glazing salesman of the century.

Now I have some very longstanding experience of the worst kind of double glazing salesmen. As early as 1979 I sat in my own lounge being regaled by a spotty herbert on the benefits of thermal break and the fact that a particular deal was only available if I signed up right then and there. I didn't get rid of that guy until well after midnight and I had thought such practices had been outlawed long since. The Kitchen Man proved me wrong. He had all the old tricks, and I do mean old.

Rule 1: Build up your product so that it looks great compared with the competition and yet justifies its high price. So he explained to me why B&Q, Ikea and Magnet & Southern kitchens are all rubbish, because they're made out of "Weetabix" (by which I understood him to mean regular chipboard) - and Magnets will even charge premium prices for their Weetabix! Then he explained why Johnson's kitchens are so much more expensive than B&Q etc, because they use triple-ply Weetabix. His sales pitch was obviously geared towards a complete moron and he didn't have the sense to tailor it for his current audience. Honestly, I would have understood the term "MDF" but it never once passed his lips.

So while I might expect to pay between £5- and £10,000 for a kitchen (to his design) from Ikea, and up to £50,000 for such a kitchen from Johnson's HIS firm could do it for the knock-down price of £19,000!! What an incredible deal. I almost bit his arm off. Almost. Luckily, (a) I had seen this sales technique before and (b) I didn't have anywhere near £19 grand to spend, so it was no hardship to me to simply stare dumbfounded at him as if he'd landed from Mars and wait for the next stage of the sales process to kick in. I did wonder later what would have happened if my kitchen budget had been £20,000. I might have thought £19,000 was a good deal and signed up right away! But wait...here comes that all-important second sales kicker.

Rule 2: The time-limited deal. Turns out they have this massively expensive kitchen-making machine and in order to cover its costs they have to keep it running 24x7. Now it just so happens that they've had a cancellation which would mean this poor machine lying idle - costing them money! So if I can have the kitchen fitted within the next three weeks, they could bring the machine back up to full capacity and pass the consequent savings on to me in the form of a free installation, saving £2,000.

Does anyone fall for this crap? I deployed my dissembling tactic (which, in case you were wondering, is completely legitimate) - that we were not going to sign up for anything until we'd had quotes for both the kitchen and bathroom, to see if we could afford to have both done or only one. So he asked me what our budget was and I gave him a ball-park figure of 10 grand. We started working through some options how we could reduce the cost of his design - taking out the more expensive cupboard designs (corner units with interior racks, etc) and the built-in fridge/freezer. With the free installation we managed to get it down to £11,000. Amazing that - a saving of £8,000 in a matter of a few minutes. I still wasn't biting, so he deployed the final Double Glazing Salesman closing tactic.

Rule 3: The manager's phone call. "You've said you have £10,000 to spend. If I phone my manager now and get him to agree to do this work for £10,000 will you sign up today?"

How can you trust a price like that? Give me the price, dammit! The real price. Stick to it. Do a straight deal. If you can do it for £10,000 you might have been able to do it for £9,000 or £7,500 or £5,000. How can I tell I'm getting a good deal? I pointed out again that I wasn't signing anything until we'd had the bathroom quote. He left, taking his design with him.

Interestingly, we subsequently realised we had been planning to demolish the chimney breast (at a cost of £2,000) only to rebuild it six inches to the right to house the range, at an approximate cost of another £2,000. We decided we'd leave the chimney breast where it is and build the kitchen round it.