Well, we just put down half of the money for our new cabinets and counter tops, so the kitchen remodel has become a reality. They’re scheduled to install them in the first week of July, so that gives us a month and a half to get the room ready. It seems like every previous owner has tried to jazz up the space with new paint, knobs or fixtures, but no one put any serious time or money into modernizing the room. Here’s how it looks:

As usual, everything looks decent in the picture, but a closer inspection reveals antiquated cabinets and shoddy craftsmanship.

One problem with the growing DIY movement is that people with little talent and/or experience are making major changes to their houses after ten minutes of incomplete instruction from a television show. I’m all about experimenting and expressing oneself, but people should start small and work their way up to more complex projects. Good examples of overconfident DIY are the counters and floor in our kitchen. There has to be at least a half inch of caulk in a gap between the backsplash and the wall and the floor tiles are a case study in lazy corner cutting (pun intended).

What the people who casually flirt with DIY don’t understand is that the person who visits or buys your house will never know what it looked like before you tiled this or stuccoed that. So even if you leave everything with a better appeal than you found it, it’s all for naught if the improvements don’t measure up to professional standards. To distill this down to one sentence, you’re not just laboring to make it look better, you’re laboring to make it look normal to people with no prior frame of reference. So if a stranger comes over and asks “did you do this yourself?” you’ve done something wrong.

We knew we’d probably remodel the kitchen when we bought the place, so we weren’t too deterred by the glaring flaws. Every house needs a little work. Our biggest problem with the room is that it’s just not very functional in this day and age. There’s very little counter space, there’s only one outlet at counter height, the refrigerator is placed in an odd enclave next to the range, and the rear wall closets house the washer/dryer and hot water heater:

There’s no other place in the house to put the washer/dryer, so we bought stackable units with the intent to build a small closet that only takes up one corner of the rear kitchen wall. After we move the hot water heater to the crawl space, we’ll have room to move the fridge to the middle of the rear wall. Here’s the new layout:

We’re going to try to have it all done before the 4th of July. Here’s what we have to do in the meantime:

1. Disassemble the dining room table and take it to the garage
2. Move all the appliances into the dining room
3. Relocate the hot water heater to the crawl space
4. Demo the existing cabinets and the rear closet walls
5. Remove the tile floor
6. Resurface the ceiling
7. Lay a new subfloor
8. Center the oven plug and add new outlets
9. Re-frame the rear wall
10. Move the dryer vent
11. Sheetrock/mud the rear wall
12. Repair and paint the walls
13. Tile the floors
14. Install cabinets and counter tops
15. Move all the appliances back into the kitchen

We’re hiring out steps 3 (plumbing), 8 (electrical), and 14 (cabinet installation) and doing the rest ourselves. Like Dirty Harry said, “a man’s got to know his limitations.” I might hire out the sheetrock finishing; I’ll have to play it by ear. I hate working with mud anyway, and if I think it’s looking amateurish, I’ll call someone up.

If we’re fortunate, we won’t run into any major setbacks and our budget will cover everything. Otherwise, we’re likely to go a little crazy. A person can only put up with cooking in the microwave and washing dishes in the bathtub for so long.

UPDATE: Kitchen Remodel 2: It Begins

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