Kitchen Woes

   We recently received some very distressing news about our kitchen... The estimate for our custom kitchen by Takara Standard came in and the numbers were shockingly high, more than twice the planned budget.

   In our estimate for the house, our architect made the following allowances for Equipment and Windows:  1.8 million for equipment, including kitchen, bathroom, powder room and toilet.  We are right on target with all equipment except the kitchen.   As for the Windows, the target budget is 1.5 million and we are currently working to align our choices with that number. 

   After seing Takara's beautiful white carved cabinets in a house designed by TwoStyle, we knew we wanted to get the same feel in our kitchen.  Takara is also known as an affordable custom kitchen maker, so we thought this process would be relatively  smooth. 

  Although we had initially thought of a more closed sort of layout for the kitchen, to hide the "occasional" mess, we then changed our minds and decided to include an island-counter.  This item needs to be custom-made, as it is not available in Japan, at least not the way we envisage it.  We were inspired by an island we saw at Ikea and many other appealing island-counters like the one displayed here.

   Our architect reassured us that he would look into other options, including Kitchen House, another custom kitchen maker, as well as a trusted carpenter. We also requested a more detailed estimate from Takara. So far, we've made just a little progress:

- We received a slighlty more detailed invoice from Takara, but we no breakdown of costs for individual items such as panels, handles, countertop, etc...  Totally unsettling.

- Kitchen House gave us a higher estimate than Takara, so they're obviously out.

- The island and the hutch could be handmade by a carpenter for half the price of Takara.  That's probably the only good news.  But then again, we need to see if the door panels could match the rest of the kitchen...   Hopefully, we can outsource the cabinets from Takara or Ikea, like this beautiful glass cabinet. 

  TwoStyle has apparently never worked with Ikea so this will be a first for them investigating options for our kitchen.  Given that some of Ikea's kitchens really appeals to us, we'd be really happy!