The Two Deadlines in a Kitchen Renovation That Nobody Tells You About

Most of what goes wrong in a renovation is not a disaster. It is a decision made three weeks later than it needed to be.

There are two dates in a kitchen that decide how smooth the rest of it will go, and neither one of them is obvious from the outside. Homeowners almost never see them coming, because nothing visible is happening yet.

Deadline one: your appliances are chosen before I draw anything

People assume appliances are a late decision. They are furniture, they get delivered at the end, so surely they can be decided at the end.

They cannot. Cabinet openings are built to the appliances. The fridge opening, the range, the space above the hood fan, the width of the run either side. I need the actual models before I can draw the space, because the drawing is built around their real measurements.

So the appliance choice happens at the very front of the project, before there is anything to look at, at exactly the moment it feels least urgent.

If you take one thing from this: go and choose your appliances first, even though it feels far too early.

Deadline two: cabinet sign off is the point of no return

When we have made all the choices and we sign off at the cabinet company, that is the door closing. It usually lands three to four weeks after we get into the design, sometimes as long as six.

After that day, changes are charged.

Here is the example I give people. You sign off with a 36 inch fridge. A month later you find a 42 inch one on sale and it is beautiful and you want it. That is six inches, and it is not six inches of air. The cabinetry either side has to be redrawn, the run changes, and the drawings go back to the cabinet company as a change. You will be charged for it.

It is not a penalty. It is somebody redoing work that was already done.

What happens between those two dates

This is the part nobody describes, so here it is in order.

After the contract is signed I come back to your house and measure, so I know exactly what the space is today rather than what a listing says it is.

At the first meeting I will already have given you a job. I ask you to leave a sheet of paper somewhere in the kitchen and write on it as you live in the room for the next while. What works, what does not, and what you wish you had. Not from memory at the kitchen table. In the room, while you are annoyed at it.

That paper is the best information I get all project, and I collect it when I come to measure.

Then I am in my office for a week or two working on the design. Everything you asked for, plus the things I can see to make it work better than it did. I send it over, we tweak it back and forth, and we do not touch a single finish until the layout is right.

Only then do the selections start, and they go in the order I wrote about here.

When it is time to choose, we book a design day together and go in a set order: the granite place first to look at full sheets, then the cabinet place carrying our countertop samples with us, then tile, then plumbing for the sink and the details.

Then we sign off. And that is the door.

The short version

Choose appliances before the drawing. Get every change out of your system before cabinet sign off.

Do those two things and the rest of a renovation is mostly logistics, and logistics are my job, not yours.

Next in this series: what actually decides the first day of demolition.

Michelle