If all goes according to plan, next week I’ll be launching my new ebook. The book is a guide on how to renovate your kitchen intelligently so your remodel goes smoothly and stays on budget. It’s pretty much an organized brain dump of everything I know about kitchens and planning renovations. It’s my best remodeling advice from my decade plus of working on houses. Sound good?
Over the next few weeks, as the book launches, I’m going to reflect back on some of the more important lessons I learned from previous kitchen renovation projects. I wrote the book with the intent of passing on those critical lessons to you so you can avoid my costly mistakes. Don’t get me wrong, for the most part, my kitchen renovation experience has been positive. However, I still think it’s important to discuss my failures, especially if we can learn from them. After all, we often learn much more from our mistakes than our successes.
Before we dive into the post, you can actually listen the audio version of the ebook’s introduction by clicking right here (you can also right click and download the MP3 if you’d like).
Here are my 3 biggest kitchen renovation mistakes from my first home. Do your best to avoid them!!
1. I Avoided Using Contractors. This one was a whopper of a mistake. Back in 2008, I hated hiring contractors. I was perfectly capable of doing my own work and simply preferred to have complete control of all my home improvement projects. Unfortunately, I ended up working on a couple different houses at once and my kitchen renovation wasn’t progressing fast enough. I was saving money, but I was spinning my wheels. Towards the end of my kitchen remodel, my wedding was quickly approaching and I was forced to hire contractors for the electrical, plumbing and drywall in order to get the work done on time. It was surprisingly affordable and unbelievably quick. Both the electrician and the plumber were done in a day or two. The drywall crew needed around a week, which allowed me to break away and work on building my kitchen cabinets. All I kept thinking for weeks was, why didn’t I hire these guys sooner?
Key Takeaway: Hiring out contractors isn’t always a bad thing. This advice probably only applies to those folks that like to do EVERYTHING themselves (like me).
2. I Assumed the Wrong Appliance Size. When I designed the layout of my kitchen, I sized my own kitchen cabinets and appliances. I used Ikea’s free kitchen planning tool to figure out the cabinet and appliance locations and then used the results for a cabinet planner program. The cabinet planner software takes your cabinet sizes and spits out a material and cut lists (yep, built my own cabinets). After I bought all my material and appliances, I realized I made a BIG mistake. I had assumed that the width of my new stainless steel refrigerator would be the same as my old one. Whoops. I designed the kitchen layout and the cabinet dimensions around that smaller fridge. As I was building the cabinets, I realized that it wasn’t all going to fit. The cabinet layout needed to be modified and I ended up shrinking a 15″ wide pantry cabinet down to a barely usable 12″ to give the bigger fridge more room. Even with that adjustment, it was TIGHT.
If you’re reading this and thinking that you don’t need to worry about this since you’re going to use a kitchen designer and they’ll figure that out, be warned. If you don’t know the exact size of your appliances (typically just width), then you end up making assumptions. If you make the wrong assumption, you have to live with it. That may mean a smaller fridge or a couple smaller cabinets.
Key Takeaway: Make sure you have your appliance sizes identified OR be prepared to stick with whatever size assumptions you use when you design your kitchen.
3. I Didn’t Work with a Designer. This problem was more of an issue for selecting materials and not so much the kitchen layout. We knew we were going to have white cabinets. That was easy. We really liked a certain slab of granite we saw at a supplier. Great. So far so good. Then it was time to pick a backsplash and we whiffed. It took us months to find something we thought coordinated well with our cabinets, floor tile, room color and countertops and I still don’t love that backsplash (even though we haven’t lived there in five plus years). We could have done better. I don’t want to speak for Lisa, but I’m aesthetically challenged. If you haven’t noticed, this isn’t a decor blog and for good reason. I stink at picking out colors and coordinating multiple pieces. Not my thing. If I could go back and hire someone for a couple hundred bucks to make a tile selection, I would.
Key Takeaway: Consider hiring a kitchen designer to coordinate all of your material selections. In the ebook, I tell you what to look for if you decide to work with a designer.
In my next post, I’ll tell you about my 3 Biggest Successes from My Kitchen Renovation.
Don’t forget, if you have a kitchen renovation coming up and you’d like to get the ebook at a discount, sign-up for our free newsletter. You’ll be the first to know when the book is available. In addition to the ebook, there will also be packages available that include an audio version of the ebook, printables, excel calculators and even one-on-one coaching time with me. It’s going to be fun. Stay tuned.
