Steps Involved in a Kitchen Remodel

Kitchen remodeling is one of the most popular home projects these days – mainly because the kitchen is a vital working space within any house. There’s rarely so much you need to change in a bedroom, for instance – and in a dining room, just to take another example, most modifications are cosmetic, and involve just moving the furniture around, rarely anything more serious that that.

However, people need to work in the kitchen; and they also need to spend some pleasant time at leisure, which makes a challenging combination, from the design point of view. A person’s habits change a lot during a lifetime – for many years you only need to grab a quick cup of coffee in the morning and move on, but then suddenly you have time for a long, home-cooked breakfast with the whole family – and your kitchen needs to be adjusted as well.

Determine How Much You Can Afford

Before starting any remodeling project, before even putting your ideas on paper, determine how much you can spend on this, and what would be the financing sources. Having a proper budget is mandatory – otherwise, this can quickly become a project into which you get to sink large amounts of money and a lot of time, with little to show for at the end.

Break Down Your Budget

Once you know how much you can spend, you can also establish where you need to put most of the money. Not everything is equally important in a remodeling project – sometimes you need new appliances, sometimes you need to tear a wall down, and so on. When absolutely everything has to be changed, at least you know that you don’t have sufficient funds and you may need to cut some corners, for now.

Create a Timeline

You can’t do everything at once – and some activities have to wait until others are completed. You can’t install the cabinets until you’re done painting the walls. This may seem quite obvious, but, without proper planning, you risk ending up with a kitchen torn to pieces while you’re waiting for weeks to have an appliance delivered. Make sure you take into account possible accidents along the way, such as having to send some parts back to the suppliers, and so on.

Determine Your Own Involvement

Sometimes it’s great to save some cash by getting your hands dirty – not to mention the satisfaction at the end of a project, when you look at a room and know that it’s done by you. But DIY projects are not always a good solution – if you don’t know what you’re doing and if you don’t have sufficient experience, you may actually end up spending more than if you hired a contractor from day one.

Factor In Some of the Unexpected

It’s a general rule in project management that all timelines and budgets tend to be exceeded by 20-25%, and that’s when they’re perfectly calculated from the beginning. As there are things you’ve probably forgotten to factor in anyway (for example, have you thought about the cost of eating out or ordering food for the duration of the kitchen renovation?), you may want to add 30%, just to be at ease. After all, if you have money left at the end, so much the better.