9 Things I Learned from Our Kitchen Renovation

My husband and I recently tackled our first kitchen renovation. Our home is sweetly nestled under mature trees, in a walkable and family friendly neighborhood of 1960’s traditional and midcentury modern homes ( not ours!) . We inherited the original footprint of the kitchen, with the peninsula configuration and fur downs that shrunk the height of our already low 8′ ceilings. Hearing countless “horror stories” of washing dishes in the bathtub and cooking dinners in a bedroom, we elected to renovate the kitchen before we moved into the house.

When my husband and I purchased our first home in the pandemic, long term planning of the home became a high priority and even became a hobby we were passionate about.

It also was within our first year of marriage so we were figuring out what we wanted our day-to-day life to look like in our home.

For those considering renovating a kitchen, here are some things I learned from the process.

1. Layout is everything

Spend all the time planning, daydreaming, and sketching to determine the ideal layout for the space. We opted to maintain the original footprint of the kitchen to stay within our budget. Unlike furniture, the layout of the home cannot be changed out easily.

Look out for pinch points

Consider how you will walk around the space. In our case, the original kitchen had a deep refrigerator and a wall double-oven which caused a traffic pinch point. We added a bit more depth to the kitchen by pushing back the adjacent laundry wall.

Assess your storage

Where will you keep your flatware? How wide or deep to drawers need to be? Will you need a drawer for your seasonings or will you store seasonings in your pantry? These are a few examples of questions to ask yourself when outlining plans for your new kitchen.

The placement of trash and recycling are vital to any kitchen layout. I grew up with a trash bin at the edge of one counter. However in our kitchen layout, the ends of the counter are all high traffic areas. If you don’t add a hidden trash bin within your cabinetry, think of where you will keep a trash can in your newly designed kitchen.

We added a hidden trash drawer to the right of our sink, that makes it simple to prep food on the cutting board and scrape the excess directly into the trash.

Thank you Emma from A Beautiful Mess for discussing hidden trash on the podcast with such passion! Glad I got this right!

Decide if walls are coming down

We still are a bit torn if we should have opened the kitchen to the living room. During the pandemic the introvert in me missed having different common rooms. In our old apartment the living, dining, and kitchen areas were located in one small space.

When redesigning the various areas in our home, we were looking forward to having a separate dining room for larger groups and special occasions. As we were house hunting, we were less drawn to homes with extremely open floor plans. An example of an open floor plan would be one large space for living, kitchen, and dining. Having some walls up allows for each space to have their own styled moment.

Knowing what we know now, opening the floor plan does does allow natural light from different directions. This sounds intuitive, but this was not something we considered as a reason to open up the floor plan or knock down a wall.

It seemed over budget at the time to open up our kitchen. However, when we discussed it with our general contractor, it actually was not that much more additional cost. A major hang-up in choosing to kitchen design with an open floor plan was where to move the stove. I did not like the idea of a gas stove on the island, nor did we entertain the idea of reconfiguring the gas line to move the entire range to the wall with the windows. We know why we made the decision we did, but it is naturally still something we think about because it was such a difficult decision.

I would encourage anyone that is taking on a large renovation project like a kitchen to have a comprehensive plan for the adjacent spaces that might be affected by your new proposed layout.

2. Hardware is the thing you interact with the most

Don’t get hardware that your shirts are going to hook on to or that feel cheap in your hand. Every time I open a draw and hold the handles I selected I feel so confident in my hardware design choice. I chose a combination of mostly pulls and knobs. We also selected cabinet latches for our upper cabinets for the less aesthetically appealing kitchen staples.

3. Define your Budget

If it is your first time renovating a kitchen like it was for us, you may not have any idea how much each item costs. We created a budget that highlighted expenses not covered in the general contractor budget. For us many of the items such as tile, light fixtures, hardware, plumbing fixtures, and appliances are selections you typically you need to make on your own. It was important to create a budget to prepare for the construction costs, but you also need to fully account for all these items to understand the true budget of the project.

You also need to account for lead times for products and materials when creating your budget. You may love a certain light fixture or even a tile pattern, but the items may be indefinitely out of stock or difficult to source in time for your renovation.

Don’t forget appliances! They are expensive, but at the same time you really want to like them. Shop around and look for holiday deals.

4. Choose your countertop material wisely!

Whether you are considering marble, quartzite, granite, concrete, tile, butcher block, or quartz, it is not all about looks. Costs, durability, care and long term maintenance should all be considered when making a countertop selection.

We selected a leathered quartzite. At the time there was not much information on whether or not the countertops should be sealed or not. A couple of weeks of cooking left several grease stains that we could not get out. I called the stoneyard and they would not give us any information on the care of the stone. I guess they did not want to be liable, but that really bothered me.

Our fabricator came back and sealed it and recommended sealing every couple of years and it really has not been an issue since. Spills and splatters are now completely wipeable.

It did cause some stress seeing stains on such an expensive purchase within days, so just know what to expect before hand and how to clean and maintain your specific counter material.

5. We did not miss a pot filler

Social media and my beautiful Pinterest boards showed pot-fillers as a “must-have” item. Who wants to lug around a pot of water from the kitchen sink? A skinny polished pot filler was the jewelry that I just knew I needed for the kitchen.

It was going to cost about $1-3k to route the plumbing to that area, and purchasing the pot filler faucet could run about $400-$1500. We opted to skip this splurge, and it is something we have not thought much about since. I mean we probably add water to a pot on the stove once or twice a month for pasta, but that’s about it. It looks absolutely stunning in photos, but it was impractical for our daily use.

6. Don’t splurge on a microwave

We really wanted a nice drawer microwave. This was also on the top of my must-have list! Let’s face it, microwaves can be an eyesore. Many of us grew up with microwaves over the kitchen stove.

When I really think about it though, we love cooking in our kitchen and maybe once a week we will reheat something in the microwave, but nearly everything tastes better heated up on the stove.

We could have easily purchased a budget friendly microwave and placed it in our appliance garage or pantry. A drawer microwave takes up essential drawer space so consider your use of microwaves before purchasing one for such a prominent space. If we could do it again, we would likely skip the microwave drawer upgrade.

7. Open-shelving is not for everyone. Know yourself.

I am very susceptible to clutter so we opted out of complete open-shelving and incorporated upper cabinets in to our kitchen design.

We have a mix of closed cabinets with latch hardware for dishes that are not a matching set (e.g. that cute Christmas coffee mug from a coworker or metal mixing bowls.)

In the glass front cabinets I have the dishes and glasses that we use daily that are generally within the same color palette. It can be quite aesthetic, but also functional. I also don’t like the idea of dust just sitting on my dishes.

Initially I tried to switch our upper cabinet fronts from clear glass to reeded glass. By the time I asked the contractor about it, the cabinets were already being fabricated with clear glass.

Absolutely no regrets on clear glass for cabinetry compared to reeded or frosted. If I had to guess what was behind each door from the obscured reeded glass it would be just a little bit harder to grab something out of the cabinet. I have enough challenges in my life! I need my kitchen to be simple.

We did incorporate some open shelving. These cubbies keep a few items on display like our favorite cookbooks, delicate ceramics, and mementos from travel that can are special to us.

8. Are induction stoves the future?

I researched induction stoves extensively, but we ultimately stuck with gas that was already setup in our home.

I went to multiple large appliance stores and sales associates could not give me much information about induction stoves that they sold.

It was hard to fathom for others getting the gas capped off to your kitchen in place of an induction stovetop.

Not too long after we selected our gas range, there was new guidance advising against gas appliances in homes for possible leakage and hazards even when not in use. We now only cook with the range hood on and try to crack open a window.

If I was starting new, I would try to think about the long term hazards that might be encountered. We really do enjoy our stove and oven, but the gas smell still gets to me at times and I think I would have preferred having an induction stove.

9. Staining cabinets: test and test again

Staining cabinets was the most challenging part of our kitchen renovation. At one point I was like “lets just paint all the cabinets!” We are both very happy with how it turned out, but boy was it a challenging process that I completely underestimated.

Know the type of wood your cabinets will be and use that wood to sample a variety of wood stains. Not every type of wood or type of stain works the same way. We ended up using a mix of stains from several different brands, but it was a trial and error process that took quite a bit of time, delaying our project.

The mix of wood and painted cabinets really adds a lovely contrast and warmth to our kitchen and we are so happy with the results!

There typically is not one right answer in renovating a space, so figure out how you live, how you want to live, and decide what elements are necessary to achieve your design goals.

If the budget is not there to do the project you feel you really need to do, maybe cut back in other areas of the renovation or hold off until you are prepared to do it the way you really want. It is very challenging to go back and rearrange walls, tile, flooring, cabinetry etc. if you change your mind.

If you have any other things you learned during a home renovation, please let me know in the comments!