About to renovate house in Vaud from top to bottom, and trying to cut costs but not quality. Any comments experiences welcome on this topic

1. Kitchen appliances:
Siemens appliances throughout but Swiss prices ridiculous 6000 CHF for an american fridge. OK, half price at places like toppreise.ch. But DE prices are 1800 CHF. Not exact same model (KA62DV71 not KA62DA71), but same voltage wattage and spec etc. In many cases the model numbers are exactly the same! So anyone have any experiences in getting electricians to fit pesky "foreign" appliances.

Usual warranty discussions with architect, much tutting when I suggested this, and "not sure if we can get anyone to do that". Having looked up DE Warranty conditions seems to suggest that they will honour them in countries where a Siemens servicing infrastructure exists.

2. Kitchen units
Maybe buying the units directly from UK, sizes all aligned. Anyone know of any kitchen fitters in the Vaud area who just fit? Units would be preassembled, so joing and doing a professional job.

3. Flooring
Architect reckons easy to get someone to install wooden flooring, harder with stone flooring.

For decent engineered flooring (due to underfloor heating) its about 100CHF m2, vs UK or FR price of 50 CHF.

For stone trying to source limestone, any non GB leads appreciated or even CH providors. Do not want to screw this bit up so may have to accept CH supply and fit.

Any other tips appreciated

PS Seems I'm living in the 80's when it comes to the value of money around here.....

Ikea do some much cheaper kitchens, I was told, but cannot confirm, that the built in appliance size here is slightly different to the rest of europe, so buying in france for example won't fit in the space here, but as I said I have no idea if that is really true or just what we're told to stop us doing it

Thanks for the reply.

As long as you give kitchen providors details of appliances they will modify cabinets to fit them. All the manufacturers have standard drawings on their websites which need little translation. 60cm width cabinets seem to be standard in UK, DE, FR and even CH!

Looked at Ikea and have not ruled it out

Standard width in CH is 55 cm

IKEA is your kitchen friend.

Stone flooring is no problem to find people that do it, but prices are expensive mostly due to the expensive hand work. There are enough companies out there that do stone and wooden floors, but 1000CHF per m2 seems overpriced. If you are a DIY freak like me, you can buy materials in Hornbach/Obi and, well, do it yourself. Floor with heating I'd go with a professional, though.

Kitchen units:
Thought width was 60cm (internal dimension 560+8mm), and depth 55cm min, although 70cm possible as well. Could be wrong but most units (ovens, microwaves ets) have same widths UK included, needing the 56cm internal dimension. Most cabinet suppliers will also do 50cm, 80 cm and 100cm units (width).

Helm, luckily the CH price is 100 CHF not laid (limestone). You are right the extra cost is in the manual labour, the priming and sealing of the floor. With average labour rates of 80 CHF for professionals it is never going to be cheap in CH.

My experience was that the listed price wasn't what we ended up paying.

When vZug was at our house to replace our cooktop their catalog price was 3k+. We looked it up on toppreise.ch and saw the same model for 2.3k. vZug dropped their price to the cheapest we found on toppreise.ch and included installation with one call to the boss.

My Miele dishwasher was also listed in their catalog for around 600 sfr more than I ended up paying including installation.

Awsome thing about being at work is the absurd quantity of dossiers on kitchen stuff behind me...

The standard measures of kitchen appliances, inclunding steamers, ovens, etc is:

55cm x 57.5cm x 76.20 cm

Should be the same in the rest of Europe, but can't vouch for the stuff from that weird country that refuses the metric system

These appliances are made to fit in modules of 60x60 cm.

Swiss standard is 55cm for appliances. It is as simple as that.

IKEA is your best source of relatively good value kitchens - HOWEVER you'll need to build the cabinets yourself - and if you can't do that to a high standard get in a professional