Buy the kitchen more than a year before completion?

Thank you for your feedback! Always very helpful here. We are just having a look around now to determine the floor plan. That makes planning easier. We will probably take our time with buying or buy when we think we have good conditions.

If the countertop is later supposed to run into the windows during the shell construction, possibly take this into account.

Our construction started at the end of April 2014. We moved in in November 2014. Our kitchen search (first meeting) took place in May 2015. Then the negotiations began with two studios in parallel. In the end, we placed the order in mid-July 2014.

The kitchens from the offers usually do not fit your individually designed kitchen (dimensions) anyway. Therefore, you can rarely use the "super-duper bargains." Furthermore, you usually have to make compromises with "bargain kitchens" (swing doors instead of lift-up cabinets, position of cabinets, color of corpus, countertop, etc.). Aside from the fact that with these bargains from the kitchen studio there is always some saving somewhere (e.g., cuts in the electrical appliances, or similar). In the end, you will put together an "individual" kitchen. After all, you want YOUR kitchen with YOUR realized wishes in YOUR house (as far as affordable). You can have this made for yourself at any time independent of the bargains.

Last but not least: Without knowing your wife - she will very quickly push every bargain kitchen toward the "throw-away pile" because she has her own idea of her kitchen. And if she threatens: "If we don’t take this countertop, I won’t cook in the kitchen," you have already lost. OK, actually I didn’t really care because I cook myself 75% of the time anyway - but I didn’t want to risk the other 25% as well as the household peace.

I see little point in starting a year in advance. A few months before is sufficient so you have peace while planning and the kitchen manufacturer has enough time for production and delivery.

So we signed a purchase contract for a kitchen a few days ago (with a down payment), even though the groundbreaking is not until 2 weeks from now and the house definitely won't be ready before next summer. But we were simply convinced by the planning, and the fronts and countertops can still be changed. This way, we've basically checked off this topic and can focus on other matters and appointments. And you get the installation plan for the kitchen earlier. However, we are buying the kitchen without appliances, so we remain flexible in this regard and especially because they can be sourced more cheaply than at the kitchen studio.

we are only just starting to build now and our builder also said right away we need plans for how the kitchen should be because of the connections.

so we just went to the kitchen studio and got some advice. the nice gentleman then drew and calculated. I then said that I need a few more days to think about whether everything should stay as it is and he sent me the draft with the plans showing where everything is (we have an island) by email. we even exchanged something and got new plans by email.

our kitchen was supposed to cost 25 TE. he wanted 11 TE right away at the time of signing the contract even though we don’t need the kitchen until June 2016.

that was too risky for me! it would be funny if the kitchen studio goes bankrupt by then ^^ that was just too long a time for me. I would never do that!! but I already have the plans for the dream kitchen

Please do not always be blinded by the list component prices... a kitchen that costs 25K€ can hardly be reduced to 11K€.