Worst Mistakes During a Kitchen Remodel

What are the worst mistakes you can make during a kitchen remodel?! Watch and find out!

Here are the top 6 mistakes made during a kitchen remodel and how to avoid them! 1. Wasting space or arranging space wrong. It’s all about grouping tasks and saving steps within a kitchen. A lot of people hear about the work triangle and you can find lots of research about this on YouTube but it’s about grouping sections like a wet / prep station for example. 2. Making walkways too small. Big one, and I worked on a kitchen last year where the homeowner just kept trying to make the island bigger and deeper. I’ve told him this is our max, you will hate it if the walkways are too small. The building code only requires 36” but in real life that is so unfunctional and feels cramped. I would always shoot for 39” or even 42” if I have the space. But it has to be a minimum of 36” per building code. The NKBA actually says for one cook we should plan for 42” and for a 2-butt kitchen we should plan for 48”. 3. Oversizing Islands This kind of goes along with the walkways and just the whole proportion of the kitchen. The island needs to fit proportionally into the space so if someone just over crams an island it just doesn’t feel right and in the end, you may hate it and now you can’t change it. I did a custom build once and I kept telling the client the island is way too long and way too skinny. Even laying it out on the floor with blue tape she just wanted to stick with it and once it was installed she did agree and wished we had shortened it and made it a little deeper. 4. Changing things during construction This is probably the costliest thing you can do, changing this during construction. Now you’re having to stop the work because trades build on top of each other. You may end up paying trip charges, you may have to re-work certain things like plumbing and electrical rough-ins, you may delay your project by waiting on new materials, and so on. I did a project once and the homeowner had the hardest time visualizing anything once we started the changes were almost daily when people were trying to install. I think on that project the change orders were more than the whole initial project itself. 5. Not checking after your rough-in phase is probably the biggest mistake I see and very costly!! 6. Not checking for heat registers