Kitchen Remodeling

Kitchens are the most disruptive room in a house to renovate and the one people underestimate most. You lose the sink, the range, and usually the refrigerator location for weeks. Before we start we walk through where the temporary kitchen goes — normally a folding table in the dining room with the microwave and the coffee maker. That decision, made on day one, is worth more to how the job feels than most of the finish choices.

Cabinets hang on walls, and walls in houses built around here before 1970 are rarely plumb or flat. We shim and scribe every run, and we screw upper cabinets into studs or solid blocking, never into drywall anchors regardless of what the anchor package claims. A loaded upper cabinet is three hundred pounds hanging above where somebody stands.

Electrical almost always needs work. Current code wants dedicated 20-amp circuits for the counter receptacles, GFCI protection, separate circuits for the dishwasher and disposal, and spacing so no point along the counter is more than two feet from an outlet. Older kitchens typically have one circuit feeding all of it. We pull new home runs while the walls are open and we pull a permit for the work.

Countertops are templated after the cabinets are set and leveled, not before, and stone fabrication runs ten to fourteen days. That gap sits in the middle of every kitchen job. We install a temporary plywood top and reconnect the sink wherever the plumbing allows, so you are not without running water for two weeks.

We keep the appliance specification sheets on site and check rough openings against them before the cabinets are ordered rather than after they arrive. A range hood one inch too wide for its cabinet opening is a four-week delay and it is completely avoidable.