Kitchen Renovation Part 2 - Kitchen Cabinets in Dubai

This can be quite tricky in the whole scheme of things. One starts to see pictures on Pinterest and read blog posts on Houzz/Apartment Therapy and starts to form a picture. The picture though is unfortunately not always doable in Dubai. Even if it is, you would either have to be very resourceful or be ready to dish out massive amounts of cash. We wanted to do neither of the two :)

We invited suppliers and suppliers to come over, measure the kitchen, do the drawings and give us an estimate. They came, measured and quoted upwards of 50,000 for cabinets and labour which was way over our budget. We were quite stuck when one of the interior designers invited us to look at one of her finished jobs. She had used IKEA kitchen cabinets with branded appliances and a Quartz worktop.

We were quite against Ikea at the beginning, we thought labour is cheap in Dubai and India is closeby - we would be able to find something in our budget. How wrong were we! Rents are extremely high in Dubai and all products/services are priced to include this rent. In contrast if you think about Ikea prices and Scandinavian design put together, its hard to say no to these drawers right?

We wanted a simple, modern design that would also fit the budget so we ended up with an Ikea kitchen. It cost us AED 20,000 and we are very happy with the finishing as yet. I will do another post after living in the kitchen for a few months.

On a sidenote, do you also find it very hard to find clean, modern home decor in Dubai on a budget? We either find excessive Golden/Silver decor or extremely expensive Ita-bloddy-lian straight simple furniture. I would love to see more stores sell my simple Scandinavian style, or God knows I will open my own store! Who knows.. :)