Kitchen Renovations - That Don't Leave You Broke

Renovation budgets, especially for kitchen renovations, can get

If you are taking on house renovations or renovating to sell or rent, then you have to do your research and come up with a good budget.

The budget you come up with, must have some wiggle room, in the amount of 10% for unforeseen events. These can happen to even the most organized renovator. You just don’t know what is behind doors and walls.

Decide how much you can spend on your house renovation. Then decide which room needs the most attention and money. If you are renovating a kitchen, then you probably have discovered from some research, and many DIY shows, that this can run into the thousands.

But before you throw in the towel, really do some research. Spend lots of time on this part, and you may just save yourself a lot of money on kitchen renovations.

Example: We are presently renovating a 37 year old semi detached house to rent out as an investment. It needs upgrades in every room. I want to attract a family to rent this 4 bedroom house, and therefore want it to be nice looking and safe. That being said, I took a picture of the present kitchen, most likely the original from 1972, and the layout was awful.

They had the fridge and stove jammed up beside each other, and lots of wasted corner spaces. After some research I took my picture of the present horrible kitchen to the local home improvement store, rather than a kitchen store. The girl there helped me come up with a great simple layout, that used all the wasted space, and a different layout for the space, without having to do any renovations.

That alone save you money. The minute you are knocking down walls, or totally changing the layout, then plumbing lines have to be moved, electrical, windows and more. I stuck as close to the original layout as possible, just a fridge move. The fridge ended up on the opposite wall, where there was nothing before. The only structural kitchen renovation that needed doing, was to run a wire for a outlet on the wall for the fridge. That was it!

Next, was picking the cabinets. She informed me, that in their store, the lighter, and simple, natural common woods were the cheapest. I thought I would need to go to those white melamine cabinets, but they were more costly. The natural maple was the most affordable. If I wanted it to be stained darker, it would add 800 bucks!

So, I went with the natural maple, then picked some simple hardware (knobs and drawer pulls etc) You can get them in packages, and then the countertop, I went dark to contrast the light cabinets. It will cost me $4500.00 installed. This is a far cry from the $25,000 that I was quoted somewhere else, that included many changes to the kitchen itself. That seems to be where much of the money ends up, is in structural changes.

So, if you are wanting to do a kitchen renovation, and have been putting it off because of your renovation budget, then just do some research. There are many other options. Sometimes you can use your cabinet backs, or add some more cabinets, or simply remove your cabinets, get new ones in a similar layout. This way plumbing, electrical etc do not need to be totally renovated.