Lessons from the Kitchen ~ Part 1

When I bought my house, the kitchen had dark brown cabinets and vinyl floors.  I put in tile floors, painted the cabinets and walls, and considered my “update” a success.  Sixteen years later, the now 35-year-old kitchen sorely needed a much bigger remodel.  My husband and I procrastinated for at least three years before embarking on this project ~ we kept spending our kitchen money on terrific vacations ~  but we finally buckled down, stayed put, saved the money and got started last June.

And now it is done.  Well, technically it’s not totally done.  We have yet to purchase and install the under cabinet lighting, although the wiring and switches are in place (have I told you how expensive LED lighting is?).  However, the kitchen is fully functional and looks absolutely terrific.  It came out exactly as I dreamed and better than I had hoped for.

As I have been enjoying my kitchen over the holidays and into the new year, I have also been reflecting on lessons learned while working on this project.

• Slow.  Methodical.  Thoughtful.  Resourceful.  Wise.  That's how these decisions will be made.”  This is a quote from my very first post on our kitchen remodel.  Ha. Ha. That’s a good one.  Yes, our intention was to approach our decisions as mature grown-ups, but emotions don’t always cooperate.  The words “I want” and “this will be the one and only time we do this” kept creeping into the conversation.  Heaven help us, though, if we hadn’t at least started out with, and stayed fairly on track with our intentions, we would most likely be divorced ~ or at least not on speaking terms ~ and would have gone waaaaaaaaaaaay over our budget.  So the first lesson we learned very quickly was to have a working plan in place before one dime was spent and one nail was driven.  That meant research, research, research and talk, talk, talk it out in advance.

•  Despite advice from friends who had already been down this road, we thought we could plan it out in one week and finish the entire project in a month.  After all, how much was there to research and how far ahead did one have to order things?  Ha. Ha. We crack ourselves up.  Lesson number two, listen to your friends.  They are much wiser because they have already entered the kitchen remodel battlefield and their war stories contain valuable information for the newbie.  We had nooooo idea how many details there are in planning and remodeling a kitchen.  When we started in June we fully expected to be done by August, and it turned out that we didn’t even begin to do physical work until mid to end of summer, because once we started researching and planning, we were overwhelmed by the myriad of details.  And truthfully, we didn’t have every detail in place before we started.

• You can’t always get what you want.  You can’t even always get what you need.  Once we started costing out our plan, we watched in dismay as the calculator kept racking up the numbers.  Naïve as it may sound, we truly did not know that our original budget was completely unrealistic for what we were trying to accomplish.  Once we reconciled ourselves to that, we went for the big plan ~ as in completely overboard in writing up our wish list.  That actually made it harder when we later had to wake up and smell the roses.  It meant deleting or substituting certain aspects, and sometimes it was hard not to be disappointed.  What really helped, though, was finally having a realistic budget that we could stick to.  It helped with decisions and made me feel better about what we were able to do with the money we had.  In fact, by the end of the project, I was feeling pretty darn good about what we accomplished.

• Work with professionals, even if it’s just for advice on specific aspects of the project.  We were often pleased with discovering things or materials or methods of construction that we didn’t even know existed.

So what did I learn so far?

It took a whole lot longer to make decisions than I anticipated.  Check.  My dream plan and my reality design are more or less aligned but with compromises on my part.  Check.  It cost more than I originally estimated but we remained good stewards of our funds.  Check.  It took longer to get started and complete the actual construction than I thought it would.  Check.

I got some features I didn't even know I would want.  Surprise.  I'm more excited about what we created than I was freaked about the money we spent.  Surprise.  I met several wonderful store employees who graciously, patiently and expertly helped us out.  Surprise. 

~more lessons in tomorrow’s blog ~