What Can I Expect When I Renovate My Kitchen? Here’s Your Entire Timeline, From Start to Finish
Part 3 of a 4 part series
For the next month, we're going to be discussing renovation—what you should be doing, questions you should be asking, and things you should consider. A few weeks ago, we discussed whether you should sell your home to either build a new one, find one on the market, or renovate the one you’re in. We also talked about renovation expenses. How much does it really cost? What’s the most expensive part of the process? This week, we’re here to break down the renovation process—everything from how it works to the entire time it takes.
The first step of the process involves the client asking for some kind of renovation, whether it’s an interior renovation like a kitchen, a full-house change-up involving every living space, or a simple repurposing of their existing space. It’s all over the map, depending on how you use your home, but a typical request we receive is for a kitchen renovation—which is what we’re going to walk through in this post. Even though we're a design/build firm, we started out as an architecture firm, so we’re truly ingrained in the architecture process. In other words, we take our time to design, plan, get our ducks in a row, answer questions, and consider the unknowns before we tear anything out. After that, we discuss pricing and construction. Let’s break this entire process down.
Completed Kitchen Renovation in a Downtown Dayton Loft
First Phase: Measuring and Documenting
When we first set out to renovate your kitchen, we’ll sit down for an initial meeting about design. This can either be done via Zoom, at our office, or at your home to walk through the space. During this time, our team will ask a few questions: What’s working for your space currently? What isn’t working for your space? What are your dreams? If there was no time limit or budget, what would you love for your kitchen to look like? How do you want to live in this space? How do you want to use it? How can it serve your life better? This meeting is all about listening to the client. We’re not spitting out ideas or solving problems—we want to understand where we’re heading. In a nutshell, you’re simply telling us why the current space isn’t working for you.
After we've had our initial meeting, we’ll send you a proposal and give you an estimate of what we think our architectural fees will be based on a budget estimate that we work through with you. If that's acceptable, we’ll come to your home and measure everything: depth, height, traffic patterns, etc. We’ll try to get a feel for how you’re using the space currently and document it all in our CAD system. If you happen to have existing drawings of your entire home, this will save you a lot of time and money—in some cases, your county or city may have a registered set of drawings from a building permit.
Second Phase: Dreaming, Sketching & Design
From there, based on your inspiration, we draft up preliminary designs, or sketches, which could include up to four options. Once those are complete, we set up a meeting with you to talk through them: What do you like about them? What do you dislike about them? Sometimes we meet twice so you have time to absorb the sketches.
Once our preliminary design meeting is wrapped up, we work on revisions. This is where we implement all of your feedback and move into design development, which is exactly what it sounds like: we develop the design a little more to work in extra details. We figure out where appliances will go, as well as storage decisions—we’re not selecting appliances or cabinets yet, but we know where drawers, doors and maybe even silverware will go.
Third Phase: Documenting and Pricing
Once design development is complete, we meet with you again. If things look good and revisions are complete, we move into the documenting phase. This is where we get a better idea of pricing. As a design/build firm, we will do the design and we’ll give you pricing based on our design. If you hire us as architects then we either help you find contractors or talk to your contractor and share the design with them to get pricing.
Keep in mind that through this entire process, everything is constantly changing, which means pricing is always changing, too. And we encourage this process! Together, we go back and forth with contractors and suppliers to make necessary revisions—which means we may have to tweak the pricing more than once.
In addition, we will go into construction documents where we sketch out all of the dimensions, as well as structural and code work required for permitting. All of this ensures that everyone knows exactly what to do.
Fourth Phase: Construction Process
Once we’ve created the designs for everyone to use, we then move into the construction process. This begins with the ordering phase—which happens to be the longest phase of your entire kitchen project. We want everything, and I mean everything, ordered with a firm delivery date before we move forward with anything else. We start with cabinets, which have the longest lead time, then flooring, countertops, backsplash tile, plumbing fixtures, appliances and electrical fixtures.
As soon as all of those essentials are ordered, we move into framing—this requires full dust protection, prepping the space for demolition, taking out walls, putting in headers, widening openings, etc. We’ll meet to discuss what you want to salvage, what you don’t, where things are going to go, and how we’re going to stage it all.
Once framing is all in, but everything's still open, we’ll do a cabinet walkthrough and a lighting layout. We want to make sure everything's working exactly the way we expected. The last part of the framing stage is MEP: mechanical, electrical, plumbing.
The final leg of the construction process requires hanging drywall, painting, installing the cabinets, countertop templating, interior trim, flooring, and backsplash. After the backsplash, we finish plumbing and electric, as well as installing appliances. This is followed by two days of clean-up, painting, fixing drawers, making sure things are straight, and then turning it over to the client.
All in all, the entire construction phase of your kitchen renovation takes around 24 days, which is around five weeks.
Have any questions?
Although we covered a lot in this post, you may still have some other questions about renovations. Whether you’re involved in the custom home process now, or even just considering it, join our free Facebook group—we’ll help you answer any questions you might have! Also, feel free to invite anyone that you think would benefit from this collaborative. You’ll not only get advice from me, but from other people who have been through this, too.
Start the process.
When it comes to designing and building a custom home, nothing beats having a trusted, experienced team of architects on your side. Let’s set up a call to meet, discuss your goals, answer your questions, and settle your fears. We can’t wait to meet you!