How to Remodel Your Kitchen

Do your guests always drift into your kitchen from your perfectly pleasant living room and wind up conversing around your kitchen table? Join the club. Ever since people first brought fire indoors, the “hearth” has remained the heart of a home. It’s also your home’s busy nerve center where a variety of activities take place, including food preparation, cooking, homework, bill paying-even arts and crafts and sewing. So it’s little wonder the kitchen is the most frequently remodeled room and the first place a potential buyer looks to determine whether a home has been consistently cared for.

The kitchen is also one room where you can add a lot of value to your home through improvements. According to Remodeling magazine, the average midrange kitchen remodel costs $43,804. The resale value of that remodel is $33,101, an average return of 75 percent. That number improves dramatically when you ramp up the project to include cherry cabinets and the latest built-in appliances, says Jim Cory, the magazine’s senior editor.

According to Cory, the average top-of-the-line kitchen remodel costs $68,962, but recoups $56,711, an excellent return of 80 percent. The return is much better for the upscale kitchen because high-end features such as granite countertops and hardwood cabinets are now considered “must-haves” in upper-tier homes.

People remodel their homes for all kinds of reasons: to increase value, to add more space, and to improve traffic flow. But when it comes to kitchens, there is another reason why many folks remodel: to impress their parents, friends, and neighbors.

“Kitchens are status symbols,” says Cory. For example, he tells of a contractor who built a brand-new $80,000 kitchen for a client about three years ago. “She called him recently to make sure he’d hooked up her gas oven to the [gas] line. Now what does that tell you? That she was willing to spend a lot of money on a state-of-the-art gas oven that she has never even used.”

Let’s face it, although the kitchen is one of the very first rooms that people see when they enter a home, and it’s where many of us congregate throughout the day, most of us don’t have wads of cash to remodel one-and then never use it. This is one room in which the budget reigns especially supreme.

“The kitchen is one room where you have to compromise all the way through or you can end up spending $60,000 pretty quickly,” says Steve Hendy, an owner of Neal’s Construction Co. in Cincinnati, Ohio. Bob Clements, owner of Bath & Kitchen Creations in Fairfax, Virginia, agrees. “You have to deal with the budget issue upfront and there’s always a degree of sticker shock.”

However, there are ways to compromise that will still add value to your home, Clements says. One of his favorite tricks is to put less expensive laminate on the kitchen counters, but trim the edges with wood that matches the kitchen cabinets. “It’s a $300 upgrade, but it looks much more expensive than that,” he says.