Fully Functional...Finally!

There is much left to be done, but we finally have water and all appliances and countertops intstalled.

Final Budget and Product Details

Okay, I know it’s considered gauche to talk about money, but we’re laying out all the details of our final budget because when we first started thinking about remodeling our kitchen, that was the one area that we were totally in the dark about, and we would have loved to have seen detailed budgets of other kitchen remodels.

Our initial budget was $60,000. We arrived at that number based on a rule of thumb that realtors have apparently devised that says you shouldn’t spend more than 15% of the value of hour house on a kitchen remodel. As you can see from the detailed budget below, we exceeded our initial budget by a little over $20,000! (Our kitchen designer, by the way, had never heard of the 15% rule, and thought it was stupid if it meant giving up the kitchen of your dreams).

Based on our general contractor’s initial bid, we thought we could do everything we wanted for $70,000. It took us a weekend to decide that we were willing to up the budget by $10,000. Then our general re-did his bid (long story, maybe we’ll post it sometime, it illustrates the hazards of working with a general contractor), and the budget jumped to $80,000. We spent about a week agonizing over whether we could go up that high or try to scale back in some areas, but we ultimately decided that we wouldn’t be happy cutting corners, and we decided to just go for it. My husband probably would have been okay with the $70,000 kitchen, but knowing me I was convinced that I would spend the next ten years obsessing over what we didn’t get. Now that the process is almost over, we’re glad we decided to up the budget and get (almost) everything that we wanted.

We did save in a few places. For example, we did our own demo, which saved the $3,500 our contractor wanted to charge us. We also did our own painting (although we will probably hire a pro to do the windows and trim). We also downgraded our drawers from “Blumotion” self-closing drawers to simple full-extension drawers, and we downgraded our pull-out shelves from full-extension to ¾ extension. That one change saved us about $500, and we don’t miss the Blumotion at all (or at least, we’ll never know if we do because we don’t have it!). We were thinking about a double wall oven, but went with a single instead.

In retrospect, we made one decision that, more than any other, accounted for the fact that we went $20,000 over budget. Our old kitchen had a soffit, which you can see in the “before” photos. All the electrical wiring for the kitchen ran through that soffit. We decided to remove the soffit because we wanted to open up the kitchen and play up the vaulted ceiling. And our lovely vaulted ceiling had no attic crawl space above. That meant that all the electrical wiring had to be re-routed through the walls, which was done by making small notches in all of the wall studs. Our electrical bill alone was almost $11,000! The re-wiring also meant that all the drywall had to come off, and the bill for re-drywalling, taping and texturing was $4,000. These two items (electrical and dry walling) accounted for over half of our general contractor’s charges! It was the electrical and dry walling that also convinced us to hire a general contractor, rather than acting as our own general contractor, which we had initially planned to do. Once we realized how extensive the electrical was going to be, we got nervous about the idea of supervising it ourselves. We were also worried about coordinating the electricians with the drywallers, and thought if we did it ourselves it would lead to big delays, which we wanted to avoid (although, in retrospect, our general had plenty of delays as well….ultimately not sure we would have done it any slower than he did!). So if we had left the soffit in, we probably would have saved around $10,000 on electrical and dry walling. We also would probably have acted as out own general contractor, and thus would have saved on labor costs overall. So it’s possible that, if we had kept the soffit, we would have been within shouting distance of our original $60,000 budget. But now that it’s all done, we think that removing the soffit is the single most dramatic change we made to the kitchen.

Here's the breakdown of our final budget, along with details about what we got.

Cabinetry (Columbia Cabinetry): $24,187
Granite for perimeter countertop (Kashmire Gold): $1,093
Granite installation (3 times the cost of the slab!!): $3,430
Butcherblock for island: $525
Butcherblock installation: $400
Round copper tabletop at end of island (got online at www.ironaccents.com; they no longer sell this tabletop, we got their last one): $604
Install copper table at end of island: $400
Backsplash material (not yet chosen, cost is thus estimate): $1000
Backsplash installation (not yet done; cost is thus estimate): $1000
Sub-zero refrigerator: $5,677
Miele gas cook top (floor model): $1,076
Dacor single wall oven: $2,046
Bosch dishwasher: $1,031
Vent-a-hood liner: $975
Custom copper hood: $2,800
Appliance delivery charges: $75
Sink (Shaws 30‘ farmhouse): $750
Faucet, soap dispenser, air gap, air switch (Rohl, country kitchens, tuscan bronze): $787
Knobs (Top Knobs, Normandy Collection, patine rouge): $427
3 pendant lights (LBL Lighting): $460
Window (Marvin): $2,500
Floor (Mirage engineered red oak)
Labor costs (Includes: electrical; drywall; install cabinets, appliances, sink, faucet; install gas line for gas cook top; install plywood decking for granite countertops): $25,407

GRAND TOTAL: $81,149

Gettin' there

Jan. 11, 2006 -- 3 months without a working kitchen. We no longer track the progress in weeks.



The Sub-Zero is in. So is the table top on the island. Next week the granite will be installed and the butcher block top on the island. Then all that's left is hooking up the sink and diswasher, finishing the trim, the lighting and the last of the electrical, the flooring, and probably a bunch of other things I haven't thought of.