Kitchen Decisions

Today we informed the kitchen designer that we were going to postpone our remodel plans for the time being.

The best price he could come up with was $19,000, down from his original quote of about $21,000. That was with us doing all the demo and me installing the backsplash tile. If we changed the finish on the quartz countertop from "antiqued" to the natural shiny finish it would have saved an additional $2,500. That meant with the cost of the appliances our costs would still have been about $25,000, or $5,000 over my budget.

The other option would have been to only buy the stove top and hood with the same options as above, bringing the cost to $20,000, which was my original budget to do everything I wanted to do in the kitchen. I didn't feel I would be getting my moneys' worth with that and so today we informed him we would have to wait.

Another thing that bothered me was I didn't feel like the designer was really listening to what we wanted. His ideas were ok, but it seemed like he kept trying to push us in his direction, what he thought would work, not really what we were thinking of.

On our last meeting we got another couple of samples. These were closer to what we had in mind, though I'm still not 100%.

Don't get me wrong, I feel bad about telling him we weren't going to do this right now. He was a really nice guy and he did do a lot of checking on various things. But I would have been really mad at myself if I went ahead with this project and felt I spent too much money.

I found it interesting and highly amusing that neither he nor the countertop or tile people would state a hard and fast price (per square foot, etc) when directly questioned. I think if we had gone in (to the counter top or tile people) on our own without the designer it would have been a different story.

I think what finally made up my mind was watching an HGTV show last night where an entire house was remodeled for $60,000! An ENTIRE HOUSE!!! We weren't even going to be moving any cabinets.

So now we are rethinking how we are going to re-do the kitchen. At this point I almost feel like I could be my own contractor. Meanwhile we will be focusing on other things for the time being.