Budgeting for a Kitchen Remodel

Earlier this week I revealed our kitchen renovation!
Thank you thank you everyone for your wonderful comments!
We are still oohing and ahhing over it ourselves and so happy to share it with everyone!

Like with most things in life, these great things come with a price.

And while our kitchen remodel would have been more enjoyable had it been free, we were able to save money here and there and still afford to eat.

Considering my career (interior design), I ventured into this project with quite a bit of background knowledge and insight (but there is always more to learn).

Luckily for you, I am here today to share a bit of that knowledge with you and a few money saving tricks we used!

1.  Make it matter

A kitchen renovation/remodel (or any renovation for that matter) is generally a big and worthwhile investment for your home.

It is important to evaluate if a renovation you are looking at is beneficial for your home. 

For example we could have gone with full custom, highly detailed cabinetry for our kitchen. 

But for one, we cannot afford that and two, neither can our house or neighborhood.  

Whenever we do leave our current house, we would have not gotten our money back.

2.  Keep it simple

One way to keep costs down during a renovation or remodel is to keep the plans simple.  Once you get into moving walls, electrical, plumbing, etc the costs automatically creep up, quickly.

The layout of our kitchen is is what it is.  We were not interested (nor had the option) of moving walls or changing the floor plan in the kitchen.  We kept the layout the same and only swapped out the type of cabinets in a few areas.  This saved us a tremendous amount of dollars.

3.  Plan 

As I mentioned on Wednesday, we started thinking about this project months before it actually happened.  Large home projects usually require large amounts of money.  Mister and I knew this was on the horizon at some point so we began saving early on to help the costs not be such a big hit.  While I am not a proponent of building up credit card debit, I am a believer in using those cards to get points and then automatically paying them off in order to get points/rewards for later on.

4.  Space it out
If you can space out your purchases, it makes biting the bullet a little easier.
We staggered buying our cabinets, tops, faucet/sink and tile over a few months.  We would make one big purchase, pay it off and move on to the next.  This helped the costs not seem like such a tornado through our finances.  We caught wind that the cabinets that we wanted were going up in price so we purchased those but then had to wait about 4 weeks for them to be installed.  While we wanted everything done asap, this helped us save money.

5.  DIY (and lean on your friends)
While Mister and I knew that installing the kitchen ourselves was not an option (not even one that needed entertaining) we knew there were some areas we could tackle.  We are semi handy and love DIY around the house.
 One area in particular was the backsplash.  While we could have paid someone to install it, we figured we could do it ourselves and save a few dollars.  And dollars we saved!
We purchased the tile online from Overstock and were able to save quite a bit.  We also found the majority of our tiling tools on sale at Lowes.  And the most helpful was that our neighbor lent us his wet saw #majorsavings
Think about what you can tackle on your own and go for it! I feel even more proud of our kitchen now knowing that our blood, sweat and yes, tears went into it.

Overall we enjoyed the kitchen renovation process and love sharing about it.  Let me know if you have any questions!

I am linking up with Kait today to talk all things budget...head on other there to see some more fabulous budgeting advice!