How to brief a kitchen showroom so the quote is worth having

A kitchen quote is a piece of arithmetic performed on the information you hand over. Give a showroom a vague description and you get a vague number — usually a low one, because a low number wins the appointment, and the missing metres appear later. Give it the room's real dimensions, the position of every opening, where the water and power already are, the appliances you intend to buy and a specification tier, and the number that comes back is one you can hold up against another number and learn something.

That is the whole purpose of a brief. It is not paperwork. It is the thing that makes two quotes comparable.

What a showroom needs before it can price anything

The room, measured

Wall by wall, in metres. Not the estate agent's floor area — the actual lengths of each wall of the room the kitchen goes in, and the ceiling height. Kitchen cabinetry is priced by the metre of units, so the wall lengths are the single most load-bearing fact in the brief. Everything else adjusts a price; the metres set it.

Measure at worktop height rather than at the skirting, and measure the same wall twice. Older Maltese townhouses and converted farmhouses are rarely square, and a wall that is 60mm shorter at one end than the other is the difference between a run of units fitting and a filler panel.

Doors, windows and the things that cannot move

Mark them on the plan with their distance from the nearest corner. A window sill at 900mm rules out a tall unit in that stretch. A door that opens inwards eats a corner. A boiler, a meter cupboard, an apertura for the water tank, a structural pilaster, a beam that drops the ceiling over half the room — all of it changes what can be drawn, and a showroom that does not know about it draws something that then has to be redrawn.

Sloped or vaulted ceilings, common in older property, matter too. So does the position of the drain if you are hoping to move the sink.

Water, waste and power

Where is the existing water supply, where does the waste run, and where are the sockets and the consumer unit? If the property is in shell form, the honest answer may be "nowhere yet", and that is a usable answer — it means the layout is free, and it means someone has to first-fix to the kitchen drawing rather than the other way round.

Say which it is. A showroom pricing a kitchen for a room that already has plumbing on one wall is pricing a different job from one where the services follow the design.

The appliances

Name them if you have decided, and say whether you already own them. Appliance choices drive cabinet sizes: an American-style fridge, a 90cm range, an integrated dishwasher versus a freestanding one, an extractor that vents outside versus one that recirculates. Whether the appliances come from the showroom or from you also changes the quote's total substantially, and two quotes are not comparable if one includes appliances and the other does not.

The look

Handleless or handled, matt or gloss, wood or painted, island or not. This is the part buyers find hardest to put into words, and the part that most changes the price for an identical footprint.

A budget band

Not a number you are shy about — a tier. A showroom that does not know your tier will quote its default, and defaults differ wildly between showrooms. Naming a band is what stops you comparing an entry-level carcase against a lacquered Italian one and concluding, wrongly, that one showroom is expensive.

How kitchens.mt assembles that brief

The quote request is built to collect exactly the items above with as little writing as possible.

1. Tap pictures on the mood board. You pick kitchens you like. The brief writes itself from what you pick, with the brands behind those pictures recorded — which is how the request reaches the showrooms that actually stock them. That matters in Malta, where most showrooms publish no brand list at all and there is no public way to work out who carries what.
2. Draw the room, or photograph a paper sketch. The planner works from kitchen shapes and reports the metres of units, and that figure travels into the brief. If you would rather draw on paper, photograph it and upload the photo — the sketch does the same job as long as the wall lengths and the openings are on it.
3. Pick a specification tier. The tier from the calculator goes with the brief, so every showroom prices the same level of kitchen.
4. Tick where it goes. Malta, Sicily, or both. Sicily is a ferry ride away and often cheaper for the same Italian brands, so it is worth ticking even if you expect to buy locally — you at least learn what the difference is. Within the EU, VAT is paid once, in the country of purchase.
5. Add the fitter, if you want one. There is an option to have a verified fitter quoted alongside the kitchen, so the supply price and the installation price arrive together rather than one turning up as a surprise after the other.
6. Send once. One upload goes to every matching showroom rather than you repeating yourself at each door.

Quotes come back through kitchens.mt with the showroom's name attached, so you always know whose number you are reading. You get a reply within one working day telling you which showrooms the brief went to. That is the extent of it — how fast each showroom then replies, and whether all of them do, is up to them, and nothing published says otherwise.

A last honest caveat

If you are buying in shell form and the internal walls are not up, say so on the brief and treat every figure that comes back as provisional. Quotes built on intended dimensions get re-measured before an order, always. And if the property is in Gozo, remember that every delivery involves a ferry — worth raising with a showroom early rather than discovering it in the delivery line of the invoice.

The brief is the cheap part of a kitchen. Getting it right costs you an afternoon with a tape measure and saves the argument later about what was and was not included.