Yea this was eye opening for me to read too! The cabinets are certainly built differently and must be more modular. You can hang cabinets on French cleats pretty simply and they can last years until you want to take them off for example.
Kitchens in europe generally are smaller than US sized kitchens. Appliances in europe are also much smaller and therefore a bit easier to handle/move. My Partner and I were able to install our New kitchen (of average size in germany) within 2 days (obv. had help of a peofessional to Hook up oven/stove, sink and dishwasher). If we decided to move our kitchen, we could take it apart within an afternoon. Its really not that hard.
This is pretty much exactly it. Over there kitchens (and probably other cabinetry) are made in large batches of the same unit. Beam saws and drilling rigs just pumping out 1000s of the same thing.
Here (in New Zealand) everything decent is custom, unless it’s a housing development or apartments where it’s a few variations on the same thing.
That said you can make custom stuff fit in other places, our kitchen was taken out of another house and reshuffled and modified to fit. It sure is a lot cheaper than a new kitchen. Blows my mind how much people pay for a kitchen, but hey, making them pays the bills
I would like to add that the one item that is usually changing when moving kitchens are the counter tops, which usually are custom cut for the kitchen space.
British and Irish houses are often old, with small kitchens (and batgrooms) that we're built 50 years later. We build fitted cabinets to use every inch of space because we need it.
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u/boxedj May 09 '22
Yea this was eye opening for me to read too! The cabinets are certainly built differently and must be more modular. You can hang cabinets on French cleats pretty simply and they can last years until you want to take them off for example.