Kitchen Remodeling

What Drives The Budget

• Moving plumbing. On a slab-on-grade DFW house, relocating a sink across the room is a substantially bigger job than it looks
• Electrical. Modern kitchens need more circuits than older houses have, which often means panel work
• Structure, meaning the wall you want removed for an island sightline
• Cabinetry tier. Stock, semi custom and full custom differ enormously in cost and very little in a finished photo
• Countertops, including how many seams the layout forces
• Appliances, because panel ready and built-in units change cabinet specification

Sequence

Kitchens go badly when selections lag. Cabinets have lead times, countertops cannot be templated until cabinets are set, tile cannot go in until layout is fixed, and appliances determine cabinet openings. We lock selections before demolition. It feels slower at the start and it is why a kitchen finishes on schedule.

If your kitchen ceiling has any history of staining, we look at the roof before building cabinets underneath it. Building a new kitchen under an unresolved leak is the most expensive mistake available here.

Kitchens In Dallas-Fort Worth Houses

Nearly every house here sits on a slab on grade. There is no crawlspace to reroute drain lines through, so moving a sink or a dishwasher means saw cutting concrete, trenching, repouring, then dealing with the flooring over the patch. That one decision moves a kitchen budget more than any cabinet door style will.

The other thing we plan around is soil movement. Expansive clay swells in a wet spring and shrinks through August, which racks door frames and opens grout lines. If a kitchen floor is already telling us the slab has moved, we say so before large format tile goes down. Big tile is the least forgiving material you can put over a slab that still moves.

In the older neighborhoods inside Dallas and Fort Worth we expect cast iron drain lines and a panel with nothing left in it. Both get priced up front instead of showing up as a change order in week two.