Peace of Mind Organizing

Lessons learned from our kitchen renovation

22 August 2016

This is the second of three posts on our recent kitchen renovation. I encourage you to also read Happiness is a new kitchen and Favorite storage features of my new kitchen. This kitchen renovation has been a great experience for us so I wanted to share!

Last week, I shared photos of our lovely new kitchen. We’re not quite finished…there’s the tiniest bit of finish work that needs to be done as soon as we get the supplies from the cabinet company. But for all intents and purposes, it’s finished.

We were lucky: ours was a pretty compressed timeline. It went like this:

• March 21: We made an appointment to have our kitchen measured by Home Depot’s installation company
• April 3: We had our first meeting with the Home Depot kitchen designer, Chris Burns, who created a design based on the measurements and photos taken by the installer.
• April 8: We finalized the design with Chris and ordered the cabinets and countertops.
• May 3: Demolition began (all cabinets were removed, with the exception of the built-in); wallpaper had to be removed too
• May 10: Cabinet installation began
• June 1: Countertops were installed
• June 3: Flooring was installed
• June 16-17: Finish work was done and cabinet/drawer hardware was installed
• June 18-19: We moved back into the kitchen!

After that, there was still more finish work to do, along with the replacement of the new floor (more on that later). But starting June 19 the kitchen was fully operational and fully enjoyable.

So we were out of a kitchen from May 3 to June 18, which isn’t bad at all, though it felt like a long time. Looking back, here are some of the lessons I gleaned from the experience. Perhaps they’ll help you if you redo your kitchen.

Lesson 1: It’s worth the hassle. As disruptive as it is to go without a kitchen for weeks or months, the effort is worth it. Having a kitchen designed to your needs, with modern storage conveniences is a joy. You get to factor in your own aesthetic, so it’s beautiful too. The memory of the inconvenience fades, but the reality of the great space remains. (Until it’s time to do it again, which for us will be a very long time from now, if ever.)

Lesson 2: Expectations are everything. Understand that there will be glitches. When you’re told how long something will take, double that time in your head. When you’re given a price, know that the cost will inevitably go up. This is reality. And expecting it will help keep your blood pressure down.

Lesson 3: Limit your options. You can go crazy making decisions if you factor in every option. There are just too many! We went in with a few ideas of what we wanted (painted, not stained, Shaker-style cabinets, dark countertops), we selected a mid-price-range cabinet line and we stuck with those parameters, which limited our choices. My husband, Barry, had some pretty solid ideas of what he was after and when we factored in both our preferences, the options that pleased both of us were whittled down. For us, making quick decisions based on relatively limited choices made the process less agonizing. And, I’m glad to say, we’re happy with the results.

Lesson 4: Don’t be afraid to be a squeaky wheel. We’re lucky because we work from home so we could keep an eye on the kitchen construction easily. Barry wasn’t afraid to speak up if something didn’t look quite right to him, and he has pretty exacting standards. We weren’t afraid to call and check on the status of orders if things seemed to be progressing slowly. Perhaps most significantly, when the installer finished installing the vinyl plank flooring in June, we weren’t shy about calling Home Depot to express concern over some shoddy work. That led to a visit from the supervisor who was very disappointed by his contractor’s workmanship. He suggested a complete replacement of the floor and sent a pair of skilled workers to do the job. The difference was night and day. I’m so glad we didn’t settle for the initial poorly installed floor.

Lesson 5: A little planning goes a long way. We were lucky; since we live in a two-family home, so we have an extra kitchen. It’s a completely substandard kitchen, but it was usable for the six weeks we needed it. We planned well so that we had just the items we needed, with the rest packed away in boxes. We only had to dip into those boxes a couple of times (primarily when Barry decided to make a birthday cake for a friend in May). Another thing I did was create a spreadsheet of where items were stored in the old kitchen and where they would be stored in the new kitchen. That gave me comfort that the new design would work for us. (We lost a pantry in the new design, so I was a little concerned.) That spreadsheet made moving into the new kitchen a breeze.

Lesson 6: If it sounds too good to be true…. Our initial contractor, who had been recommended to us, gave us an incredibly low bid. I figured he was just a really poor estimator and I tripled the amount in my head and was still satisfied. It became apparent with just the small amount of work he did after the demolition that his quality standards were not high enough. So we fired him. Luckily we had discovered a really great contractor, so everything went off without a hitch. But we should have known when we saw the initial contractor’s bid that he wouldn’t be the guy for us.

How about you? For those of you who have been through the experience, what lessons did you learn? Please share!

Tagged with: kitchen, kitchen organization, kitchen renovation 2016

Comments