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Why I would never buy a kitchen from John Lewis again
As I sat down in John Lewis and said that we would like to buy a kitchen I thought, well it’s a lot of money but we are in good hands. We fondly imagined that at the start of one week we would have a shabby old kitchen and at the end of the week we would have a bright new one.
It has been three months of disruption the kitchen is almost finished.

John Lewis are quite familiar with installations requiring rectification work and warn you of this. Nothing prepared us though for the feeling it was just us and the installer. We were obliged to monitor what he was doing to ensure that it was up to scratch, to list out all the things that needed redoing and to arrange for his two return visits to sort things out. I had the impression that he wasn’t compensated for return visits and this added to our stress. The work that we were doing on the kitchen, painting the walls essentially, was made more difficult through the lack of any proper project management by John Lewis and we were left with a lot of tidying up work to do on the plastering that the installer didn’t seem to think was his responsibility.

My overall gripe is that I can’t see what John Lewis has really done for us. After the somewhat hit and miss design stage we only received standard letters from them and had no one-to-one contact, they never inspected the work or asked us whether we were satisfied with it. In no sense were they project managing the work, we had no sense that they were holding our hands through the process or really that they cared at all whether our kitchen turned out well or not or whether the gas and electrical work was done by trained and certified people.

Planning
Step one is the visit by the John Lewis kitchen planner who couldn’t wait to get away. He listened to what we thought we wanted, made a few suggestions and left. In hindsight we can see that a more engaged person, as he didn’t appear to lack experience, could have helped us get considerably more out of our new kitchen. For instance we got high line cupboards whereas drawers are, in fact, much more practical; the balance between drawers and cupboards in our new kitchen is entirely wrong.

There were some other issues:

1. He sold us a fluorescent tube that didn’t fit under the unit it was bought for.

2. He wanted to sell us decorative cladding for the wall to fit between the worktop and the wall cabinets what would not have been tall enough to fill the space.

3. He didn’t offer us side panels on the larders or end of wall cabinets so we now have different whites in the kitchen.

Project management
Deliveries of the worktops and units are made the week before installation so that you have to be in on two separate days to receive them. Why can’t the installer take delivery in the first couple of days of the installation when he is removing the old kitchen?

We were only notified who the installer was to be just before the work was to start leaving him and us with little time to plan the work.

We were doing some of the work ourselves and I can see now that with proper project management, by John Lewis, that work would have been considerably easier.

We were installing a few cabinets along one wall (as John Lewis do not supply custom sized units for the kitchen we were buying) and painting the walls and ceiling.

Tiles were being taken down, a larder removed and the serving hatch to the dining room filled in. This meant that all the walls and entire ceiling had to be skimmed. This was not identified by the John Lewis kitchen planner and meant that the significant cost of this work was sprung on us at the last minute by the installer. The last minute nature of this work also meant that we had no time to get other quotes and just had to pay what was asked of us by the plasterer chosen by our installer. As there was only a weekend between the skimming and the installation commencing this meant that we had to spend a weekend drying the walls of the kitchen, with fans and heaters, as it seems that the installer intended to fit the cabinets over the wet plaster.

The order of the jobs should have been: removal of the old kitchen, plaster skimming, painting of the walls and ceilings and then the fitting of the new kitchen. In reality the installer fitted everything and then we had the enormous task of painting it all, making the job much more difficult and time consuming.

What advantage do you get from going to John Lewis?
I should explain at this stage that John Lewis sub-contract the fitting of the kitchens which means that you deal with the installer and not John Lewis. In fact John Lewis’ role seems to be simply to take a profit on selling you the units and arranging for an installer to come round. It would be a good deal cheaper and, I think now, much better to find an installer, buy your units online and get him or her to install them. You would have more control as you have to pay John Lewis in advance and increase their profits for no noticeable contribution.

Problems with the installation
I have no complaints about our installer except that, like lots of workpeople, he was inclined to cut corners. The John Lewis people lead you to believe that the place will be buzzing with lots of workpeople getting the job done asap in a week. In fact our installer did it all himself. That meant that it took 10 days to do the work and not five. That’s ten days without a stove or a kitchen sink.

Well I mentioned cutting corners, all rectified on two subsequent visits, what sort of thing:

1. Bodging up the installation of the cooker hood ducting, with an old vent (without flaps) and duct tape so that the hood was noisy and cold air came in from the outside. I just bought a ducting kit and redid it myself. This was difficult as the hole the installer cut in the wall was too small even for the smallest ducting recommended by the hood manufacturer.

2. Not fitting all the legs on the units and not screwing all of them down so that they touched the floor, bad in itself but it also meant that some of the plinths had to be fitted with screws and not clipped on.

3. Not fitting two end panels which we had paid for.

4. Putting transparent silicon straight onto the brown topcoat plaster behind the sink so that we would have had a brown line behind our sink if we had not insisted it be removed and make good.

5. Boxing off the end of the wall cabinets with a piece of melamine board which did not match the colour of the cabinet doors.

6. Bodging up a short return on one of the worksurfaces to compensate for an error made by the John Lewis planner. This meant that the worksurface had to be removed and the joint redone.

7. Not tidying up the gouges left in the plaster after refitting the worksurfaces correctly

8. Not completing the plywooding of the floor before putting in the base units.

9. Not making good the areas that the plasterer did not finish properly. In particular the plasterer didn’t skim below the level of worksurfaces but in our kitchen some of that part of the walls is visible. I was left to sort all of this out myself which took a long time

10. Not bothering to put down proper dustsheets so that we were forever cleaning up after him and filling our lounge with his tools.

11. Not sweeping down the drive which he had covered with sawdust.

12. Not replacing the old sockets and switches in the room and leaving them covered in bits of plaster.

13. Reusing the old waste pipe under the sink so a shabby old pipe is visible.

14. Not sorting out the poor drainage of water from the sink in the kitchen although all the pipes were exposed and it could have been done.

15. Leaving a gap between the top of the plinths and the bottom of the base units.

16. Not fitting a socket correctly so that it worked loose

17. Inadequately mending a bar in one of the cabinets that had broken

18. Leaving one, isolated, unit insecure so that it rocked.

Dangerous cutting of corners
Now for the more serious cutting of corners:

Our installer removed and installed the new cooker himself despite not being a Gas Safe engineer.

He left mains voltage connections under the wall units just in connectors wrapped in red! electrician’s tape. He then fitted brown connector boxes despite the fact everything in the kitchen is white.

No gas or electrical certificates were ever received.

Surely John Lewis monitor the work as it progresses?
You might expect to receive some advice on preparing for the installation i.e. you should defrost the freezer and clear out the kitchen – nothing.

But surely John Lewis are in touch with you as the job progresses to see that things are going well? Surely they come out to inspect the work themselves to see that it is up to scratch? No and No. Once they have your money you never hear from them again unless it is to threaten you with extra costs if the installation work cannot start on the agreed date or if they think you should pay for rectification work that is the fault of their planner. At the end you get a self satisfied letter saying I understand that the work which we undertook to provide you with a fitted kitchen has now been completed and, I believe, to your satisfaction”.

But they do not ask you for feedback and confirm with you to see that the job has been completed properly. No and no.

All of this nightmare went on for three months before it was finished. A dream kitchen made into a horror story.