“Rather than spending thousands of dollars on a pro, design the kitchen yourself,” Bob Vila’s crew recommends. But is the advice from This Old House relevant to your current house? Let’s talk this though.
Do you want to design your kitchen yourself? The desire for a better, more enjoyable kitchen doesn’t always come with the desire to spend long hours creating learning how to draft detailed plans that will actually be usable by builders & in compliance with local building codes. Not everyone enjoys getting hands on and deeply involved in their kitchen upgrade, especially the parts that require high precision and attention to detail.
Do you have the time and ability to design your own kitchen? Working with skilled professionals, the design phase of a major kitchen remodel takes 4-8 weeks. If you’ve never designed a kitchen before, and you’re learning everything you need to do as you go, it’s very reasonable to expect the design phase to last at least twice as long. Considering how much time you’re already devoting to your job, family, and other obligations, this may be a daunting prospect.
When you hire a kitchen designer, you’re paying for expertise, experience, and time. Professional kitchen designers are already fluent in the concepts and industry information you’ll need to learn in order to design your own kitchen. It’s easy to minimize the difficulty of planning a major kitchen remodel, but once you get involved with a project, the complexities become clear pretty quickly. There’s a learning curve with everything, and in construction, mistakes are very expensive. The thousands of dollars one can save by planning the kitchen themselves can easily be erased through naive bad decision making.
To save money on your kitchen design, work with a design build contractor who specializes in kitchen upgrades. This is a highly preferable alternative for people who want the easiest, most cost-effective way to achieve a kitchen they really love in a timely fashion.
