Remodeling Our Kitchen

Some of you know we are remodeling our kitchen.

What we’ve done and how we made some of our decisions.

1. New stainless steel appliances.
   • Sears is running a deal till early March that gives a 20% discount if you buy 3 appliances. Done.
   • We already have the Kenmore Elite french door/bottom refridgerator with water/ice on the door. Its really a rebranded LG I think.
   • The three appliances we bought were the Kenmore Elite Dishwasher (Elite UltraWash HE 1315), rated high by Consumer Reports, Kenmore Elite Microwave 8083, again rated high by CR, and Kenmore Elite Oven #46713, unrated by CR.
2. Scraping the popcorn ceilings
   • Popcorn removal is kind of expensive and I looked into doing myself because its not that difficult to scrape off, but its an extremely messy job.
   • There are two options with popcorn removal. The first option which is the most common and least expensive is knockdown. Basically its a sprayed clay or mud that has a stucco like look to it, but flat. The second option which is a flat scrape is the most expensive and most time consuming option. To flat scrape its around double-triple the price and it requires about 3-4x the amount of time and you can’t live in the house when its being done (or so we’re told).
   • We found a company who brought in a crew and did flat scrape within 1 day. In and out. Great service and highly recommend them for popcorn ceiling removal in South Florida area.
3. Kitchen Cabinets
   • We’ve looked at 5 different Kitchen remodeling stores to compare prices. Home Depot Expo, Home Depot, a very reputable local Kitchen & Bath co., a wholesaler for Omega Cabinetry, and IKEA.
   • Home Depot EXPO - Retail prices, comfort of someone doing everything for you. Good for the person who wants NO HANDS on the job. Also good for higher end appliances, fixtures, and finishes. Again its retail prices and you pay for the comfort of someone taking care of it all for you. No ability to find best prices. At EXPO you get an account manager that manages all the sub contractors, but they come from different places and they never know what each sub contractor is doing so it can cause frustration for the homeowner when there is a communication breakdown. You can also opt to act as the General contractor and sub out the different parts, but you are still paying a middle man here.
     Final opinion: Considerable savings by going elsewhere, but would require considerable work/research/time on our parts.
   • Home Depot - Retail prices, semi-comfort of someone doing most of the job for you. Good for the person that doesn’t want much Hands on the job. Limited ability to find best prices. At Home Depot you also get an account manager that sort of manages some sub contractors. If you choose to do just the cabinets, then its up to you to get sub-contractors for everything else. You are still paying a middle man here. One bad item for people who choose to do the whole remodel through HD is that they sub out to all different companies anyways based on availability and then those subs tend to not have good communication with the homeowner and between each other. These are some of the reasons why there are a lot of complaints about HD for kitchen remodels. If we went with HD we were only going to order the cabinets from them.
     Final opinion: Cost was semi reasonable, but for a little bit more money, we could opt for the best cabinets on the market. So for around one thousand dollars more we could get Omega cabinets vs Thomasville cabinets. Omega is rated the best from Consumer Reports while Thomasville is second best.
   • Local reputable Kitchen co. - Very expensive - retail prices. Best option for the person that wants nothing to do with the remodeling job. You have one main contractor and he handles all the work. They used Omega cabinets. Very high end kitchen remodel place. This reputable local kitchen co. was even more expensive and charged a huge premium for using Omega cabinetry. There is a large mark up on these cabinets and they are rated as the best.
   • IKEA offers a high end look for an extremely discounted price. We have never been to an IKEA and had limited experience with IKEA products. Although we always loved their catalogs. However, that price comes with the hassle of assembly, cheaper quality construction, no customization in terms of special sizes, and limited styles.
4. In the end it came down to two things. Style and cost with cost weighing heavily. We loved the looks of IKEA Adel Medium Brown cabinets as well as the Nexus Black Brown cabinets. However, the closer we inspected the Nexus Black Brown style the more we were worried about chips on the cabinets. See Nexus BB is a veneered MDF, while Adel MB is of slightly better quality with solid doors. With two kids running around we didn’t want to worry about easy chips happening in the kitchen, which is what our old cabinets were. The other thing was cost. With IKEA cabinets being about 1/4th the cost of Omega Cabinetry it became a no brainer, not to mention we loved the style of the Adel Medium Brown. We were buying alot of other things, so the savings in the cabinets afforded us to do more around the house, like buy a new couch, new tv’s, a new wall divider, scrape the ceilings, other new furniture.

More to come later until then, here is a video of our old kitchen: