Kitchen Renovations

I think it would help if you gave an idea of budget or style. Your question is almost like asking...can you suggest a car for me to buy? I am doing a kitchen renovation and am happy with my cabinet choices (Medallion), and my kitchen designer (Michael Palladino). Both my choices are middle of the road (whatever that means), but kitchens can cost very little or hundreds of thousands. I think a little more guidance would help people give you some recs.

redid my kitchen 5 years ago; new tile floor, tile backsplash, granite counters, etc. used a company called nufacers on upper east side (lex) cause i didn't want to pay for brand new cabinets which would have been more than i wanted to spend. they refaced all cabinets, did new appliance installation, granite countertop install as well as floor and backsplash. amazing job. could not be happier with how kitchen looks. very professional, highly recommended!

The kitchen is approximately 130 sq. feet (10x13) and we really don't know budget yet. Less would be best but thinking $50-$75K (or less!)
we are just sarting out so really don't know what we are going to want, etc.

Go visit the displays at Home Depot, the Manh Center for Kitchen and Bath (MCKB) in the Flatiron District, Gringer and Sons for appliances, and other showrooms such as you may find at the Design and Decorators Building near Bloomingdales. Start getting an idea of style and what is available. It will focus you.

One suggestion if you want to save a TON of money, are willing to be a little flexible, and don't mind the current layout of the kitchen:

Use the current cabinet carcasses and have new doors made, and use stainless steel appliances with look like a higher grade than they actually are and a cheap granite counter (I mean pick a cheaper granite as opposed to exotic)

Thanks for all the suggestions. This was just what I was looking for. Places to check out and ideas to save money.

And don't forget Ikea for cupboards. They no longer have personal design consultation, but they have free downloadable kitchen design software on their site.
http://www.ikeafans.com/home/last-ikea-kitchen-sale/

And a great community to help you plan: http://www.ikeafans.com/forums/kitchen-planning/

On the other hand, if you find yourself out of ideas on how to spend MORE money on the reno, you just hit me up and I'll have all kinds of suggestions from customized cabinet millworkers to $1600 microwaves to sinks and faucets priced so high you'll need oxygen just to breath when looking at the price tags. :)

We just finished a gut renovation of our 71/2 x 12 kitchen. The cabinets were supplied through our GC who used Infinity Woodworking in Long Island City. The quality is superb, but you really have to be knowledgeable about planning a kitchen, since their expertise is strictly in cabinetry. It worked for us because this is the third kitchen we've done, and knew exactly what we wanted. We used Caeserstone counters (which are the best, easiest to maintain counters that I have ever had). Hardware, sink and faucet (from efaucets) were purchased online after shopping local stores.
Good luck. My advice is visit as many kitchen places (as suggested by Kylewest in particular)and pay attention to their displays, and all the bells and whistles that they contain. You'll get lots of ideas.

I'll add a shameless plug. Our online source helps homeowners working on kitchen and bath renovations make informed design decisions.http://www.designinabag.com/. Good luck with your project!!

I used a project manager who did a total gut renovation on my apt www.icandothatforyou.com they were AMAZING would use them again in a second

mjh, did your project manager work with a contractor on your guy renovation? I'm not certain what the difference is between a project manager and a general contractor. Thanks.

Hi,

Great ideas above. When I did my kitchen..went to design showrooms and quickly narrowed down to what I liked and didn't like. Showrooms are a tremendous help. I used a contractor that a neighbor had used and had fantastic luck.
He was also very helpful with sourcing and negotiating lower fees with the suppliers.

Feel free to contact me for my contractors name and information. He is FANTASTIC! He renovated a 2bd/2ba apartment for me and did gut renos on 2 friend's apartments: one a studio and the other a 3bd/3ba. They are thrilled and would be happy to give a referral as well, I'm certain.
Unlike previous contractors I have used, he was completely honest, came within budget (really) and on time with the project. I wouldn't think of using anyone else. He is also fair in terms of pricing. He will try to work within your personal budget-when reasonable. Great, great guy.

Good luck and feel free to contact me if you'd like his info. You can email me directly at: tracy5760@gmail.com.

Good, good luck!

Tracy

PS. When you negotiate tile prices-be sure you ask for the "contractors discount" which ranges from 15-25% off, depending on the company!

can anyone suggest where i can have a kitchen island designed and installed? i just want a specific size built-in island. anyone know approximately how much it would cost? obviously based on materials such as marble granite etc. but aprox.

Approximately what does a large (say 12 x 15) "low high end kitchen" cost - by this I mean very nice appliances (Subzero, Viking) but not necessarily the best/craziest models, and nice sturdy cabinets and mid-quality granite. I know people can spend $200-300k+ when they get into custom cabinets, etc., but what if you just want "nice" but not "designer" everything except for a few requisite name brand appliances?

Please, a high end kitchen is not defined by a brand of appliance or the most expensive cabinets you can find. Haven't we learned anything in the last two years? How viking and subzero have become synonymous high-end baffles me -oh that's right, because they are the most expensive.

High-end is not form over function, it's the other way around. Try living with cleaning the gloss black cooking surface of a Viking range daily and tell me how functional you're "high-end" kitchen is. Consider the lifetime repair costs of a SZ.

My high end stove is cheap, cooking surface is commercial (cast iron) It has an infrared broiler and a flame pattern that will actually heat the bottom of a small pot, rather than its sides. The answer is Blue Star baby. The fridge is the German engineered Liebherr, which has a far better product than SZ at a far cheaper price.. The cabinets? Show me a system more functional than Ikea. Its simply engineered to work. Yes, you have to build it yourself but what could be more fun on a shitty rainy day? The correct answer is nothing. And now guess what??? You can change the complete look of your kitchen when you're tired of it by replacing the fronts, which will always be available and will always fit for $50 a door. The key to making an Ikea kitchen look "high-end" is to mix and match styles and colors with great counters and appliances.

Functional appliances, cabinets that can be easily modified and renewed over time, money in the bank to buy the best ingredients. Now you're talking high end.

Relax, why do people on this board love to jump all over people for anything they say? I was giving an example that everybody is familiar with, saying I'm willing to spend a little money (if I'd said "Liebherr fridge" people may not have know what I was talking about) on nice appliances but specifically said "not necessarily the best/craziest models" and said I don't need "designer cabinets."

Anyway, 1) I subletted a condo with a Liebherr that has broken multiple times, even though I have heard good things about those 2) Ikea cabinets look nice from a distance (if well installed) but are too modern for my tastes, but most of all they are not sturdy so the idea that you can change them out when you feel like for years to come is ridiculous 3) I am actually a very good cook so please don't lecture me.

ok

btw kspeak, when I had my shop I hand built the cabinets in my last two kitchens to outlast the house. But I knew that in 10 years the people coming behind me would likely rip them out for something new. The need to build to such a high degree of quality is gone and the "I'll never settle for second best" crowd are going over the top and paying for multiple designers and middle men, because that's what the marketing tells them to do. The end result can be of dubious quality. Once these one-off kitchens are installed they can be far less serviceable than something from Ikea. Just saying, if you're on a budget as most of us are, don't be blinded by the high-end marketing.

...this Ikea kitchen isn't overly modern imo:

http://www.mochatini.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/ikea_kitchen_3.jpg

is the apt pre-war or post-war? if its pre-war, i recommend the route that fllady took and have them locally custom-built - there are tons of places in LIC which do this. I recommend this because after 80+ yrs of settling, you won't have any square corners and edges, and a good custom builder can prepare trims that even things out. You'd be surprised at how economical they can be.
If you are a good cook, I recommend Capital ranges - not too industrial looking, but excellent performance. I find blue star to be too industrial - I don't want my kitchen to look like a commercial kitchen.

I'll give you this isn't especially modern - love love love white cabinets although prefer slighlty more creme - but don't like the metal fixtures. I've never found Ikea cabinets particularily sturdy. When I open a drawer I like it to glide smoothly,

We are buying what I think will be a long term home - a townhouse that we can easily afford and we want to raise our children here - so we're not buying it for resale value. I agree that generally the people behind you rip them out often, so it's a good point for the 5-10 year owner. Yes, unforseen things may force us to move but in our situation this is unlikely - we are a two career family and both of our industries are relatively New York centric, and we're not stretching. My parents had sturdy, well made solid cabinets which they refinished several times - this is what I am thinking. Although I think white/creme cabinets are neutral enough I may never get tired of them.

I've always been a halfway person when it comes to high end marketing - I think to some extent you get what you pay for, but only to a point. I call this "low high-end" which is what I'm going for. It's the Theory or Tory Burch of kitchens.

Intersting - I always thought custom cabinetry was really expensive.

Holy cow kspeak. Ikea drawers are incredibly smooth and tested 24x7xforever by robots in plexiglass cages.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2NjwcfZspo

Kspeak: I have custom cabs & Ikea cabs installed. Custom cabs are in the kitchen. They are from a local cabinetmaker (not Manhattan, NJ/Bx-based). 30k for a large galley, approx. 15X2. I prefer the "look" of the custom cabs, but I like the Blum glides of the Ikea cabs better and I like all the cabinet accessories from Ikea (much cheaper & better than other ones - Hafele/K-V/Rev-a-shelf).

What I would suggest if you go custom is to do standard sizes (my #1 mistake) - 18/24/32/36-inch cabs so you can buy from a greater range of cabinet accessory mfrs (by this I mean the lazy Susans, pull-out pantry, built-in trash disposal/recycling).

The ones I've seen are incredibly smooth for about 2 years then start to wear down. This is from a couple friends who have them

The beauty of Ikea is that you can replace everything for v. cheap. Custom cab hardware is not necessarily better, depending what slides you get.

Personally I am a little nervous about that "you can replace everything." I had Ikea wardrobes/clothes organizers for years. They wore down pretty quickly ... and also when I tried to re-order certain things several years later the new stuff didn't work with the old.

printer - thanks for the Capital Range recommendation. I'll look into that. I don't mind somewhat of an industrial look in the kitchen as long as not overdone. But these seems to be a good balance.

"Personally I am a little nervous about that "you can replace everything." I had Ikea wardrobes/clothes organizers for years. They wore down pretty quickly ... and also when I tried to re-order certain things several years later the new stuff didn't work with the old."

It's called "planned obsolescence", and it's what keeps us buying new computers ... new cell phones ... new everything, every other year.

Look at television sets. A good set used to last you 20 years (or more), until the tube finally failed. Then we found out about how our wide screen HD televisions developed this "burn in" problem after just a couple of years. Now, after everyone has laid out thousands for HD sets, they're talking 3-D sets.

Damn that technology! Stupid engineers always coming up with new, innovative products. Why do they keep trying to improve our lives? When I was young we wrote with hieroglyphs on cave walls, and they would last for 3000 years, and we liked it!

"Damn that technology! Stupid engineers always coming up with new, innovative products. Why do they keep trying to improve our lives?"

Actually, I don't see HD as having been an "improvement" in my "life".

What I don't like is that we're all being forced -- whether we like it or not -- into buying into the new technology, rather than being given the option to "opt in".

For instance, more and more television programming is unwatchable on my current 25-inch conventional television, because it's programmed for much larger screens (sports programming, in particular, with all the tiny graphics). How has this "improved" my life?

I also don't like to leave an electronic paper trail of my purchases and payments, nor do I like the vulnerability of my bank accounts vis-a-vis these blasted "debit" cards. I prefer writing CHECKS, and I resent that more and more places are trying to phase them out. How has making our bank accounts more vulnerable to ID theft "improved" our lives?

In particular, I hate the fact that my rotary dial telephone now doesn't work with the majority of these fcuking electronic phone menus. How has 15 minutes of maddening "press 1 for blah, press 2 for blah blah" improved ANYONE'S life??

not being able to read the inane graphics that pop up during sports broadcasts is a gift - be thankful for that. But how you can think that sports, in particular, in HD is not better than in SD defies logic.

rotary dial telephone -good idea, because those new push button things will store all the numbers you ever enter -like bank accounts, social security numbers, nuclear launch codes. The FBI and kids with computers can download the information and post it to the inter web. I was able to get my phone in the same orange as my laminate counter top and there's no way I'm giving it up unless my laminate needs replacing but it lasts forever, so.

HD for tv shows, I can go either way (I prefer to have more saved on my dvr and lower resolution).

But sports, forget about it. It looks just wrong in regular def now. With the movement and crowds and all that, regular def looks blurry to me now.

And thats before factoring in the fact that they are making regular channels look worse now. Seriously. Certain channels have lower than regular resolution on their regular channels. I had a friend with a non-hd tv and we were experimenting, some channels (especially college sports) has horrific resolution on the regular channels.

"Use the current cabinet carcasses and have new doors made"

I believe thats what the poster above meant by "refacing". And agreed.

"and use stainless steel appliances with look like a higher grade than they actually are"

I hate these - no magnets! - but he's right for resale value.

> and a cheap granite counter (I mean pick a cheaper granite as opposed to exotic)

Agreed. Countertop can make all the difference in the world. If the appliances and cabinets are decent, going from formica to granite or some stone (even concrete) will make all the difference in the world. Bathrooms, too.

"Damn that technology! Stupid engineers always coming up with new, innovative products. Why do they keep trying to improve our lives?"

I refuse to use that Internet thingy. Its a fad. Too many tubes.