Everyone knows doing DIY in France can be expensive. However, if you are savvy, you can still build an Oak Kitchen on the cheap. With very limited skills and only a few hand tools we managed to build a good looking kitchen that looks semi-professional.
Is it possible to scratch build a large, fully fitted kitchen for less than 500 euro?
We’d been scouring Brocantes, Vide Greniers, Marketplace and eBay, for new and old.
Now was the time to step up and see if those woodworking skills; which I’d never used since I was 13; were notetable.
The Original Kitchen
Our old kitchen had been abandoned for 30 years. When we first saw it, many would have turned and run.
A quick check with a spirit level and a right angle square proved that kitchen walls were several degrees from vertical and square. The floor was just as bad.
Everything was wonky!
Ceramic Sink
The vintage ceramic sink; mounted on cast iron brackets embedded in the wall; was quiet low but would set the height of the counter-top.
Auction Bidding
After some clever auction bidding, we’d spent a total of £20 on appliances. We had a NEFF double oven, an induction hob and some Bosch appliances.
I’d bought over 50 practically brand new Oak shaker style doors for £90. Some were solid oak, some had glass inserts.
Having looked at the price of flat-packed, we accessed the difficulties of fitting it in our awkward shaped room.
It seemed like a good idea to see how hard it would be to use sheets of 18mm pine board.
- Luckily there were 2.5m lengths on offer, so we filled up the van with 20 sheets (250 euros). Luckily, we didn’t need all 20 for the kitchen.
The worktops were our downfall, we saw some nice laminate ones that only cost 39 euros a length and we would only need three. Then we saw some exquisite solid cherry maple parquet tops but they were shorter and four times the price. Solid wood parquet worktops in France are third the price of the UK, which is lucky as we needed four 2.5m lengths. We’d blown our 500 euro budget 🙁
The Walls and the pipework
In our previous video we cleared all the tiles off the walls. We still needed to chisel out a hole down into the cave below for all the pipework to go through. The electrics would also need chasing through the wall.
This large hole below goes through 1 meter of solid granite and stone into the cave below. This is for the electrics, the hot and cold water feed and the drain from the sink. The grey pipe was temporary until we went shopping.
Oak Kitchen
Once the kitchen had been cleared of all previous signs of occupation and the electrics and plumbing had been routed, plumbing began.
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