Let’s Talk Custom Home Kitchens: Budgeting, Cabinets, Appliances, Sustainability & Renovation
Whether you’re renovating your current home or designing an entirely new custom home, kitchens can be an overwhelming part of the process! From appliances to cabinets, budgeting and even choosing sustainable options—there’s a lot to consider. Having a trusted team on your side is the first step (we can help with that!), but in the meantime, let’s alleviate your fears by walking through each major component of the process. Keep scrolling to learn more…
How Should I Budget for My Custom Kitchen?
When it comes to your custom home budget, almost everyone in the industry prices by square foot. For example, many builders will tell you they build for $200–$300 per square foot. In fact, we here at Springhouse even use this pricing system for estimates. However, it’s not a standard of measurement. Simply put, there’s so many variables that play into this way of pricing, and everyone uses it differently. Let’s take a closer look...
Not Every Square Foot is the Same
The square foot price is an average of the total cost to build the house, all the way from the basement through the roof, divided by the number of square feet in the house. But like we mentioned earlier, there are a lot of variables that need to be defined.
Not only do you need to know how many floors you have, you also need to consider the design of the home. Why? Because not every square foot is calculated the same as the other...
For example, one square foot you take in the living room might include joist, subfloor, hardwood floor, air, drywall ceiling and roofline attic space. That’s a lot different square footage than in the kitchen where you have joist, subfloor, high-end tile, cabinets, plumbing fixtures, sink, appliances, etc.
As you can see, the price per square foot depends on where it’s located in your home.
Square Footage Pricing Depends on the Design of the Home
Keep in mind: the smaller the house, the higher the square footage price. Confusing, right? Well, you still have the kitchen and master bath, which are the two most expensive rooms—you're just compressing all of the open-air square footage. Although this means a higher square-footage price, that doesn’t necessarily mean a higher construction price, of course.
Lastly, if you're over budget, and you're considering reducing the square footage price, remember that every square foot is not the same. If you ask to take out two feet of the master bedroom, living room and dining room, that's not a lot of money saved. On the other hand, it’ll be a much different calculation if you're taking two feet out of the master bath, the kitchen and the covered porch with the pavers, wood ceiling and other high-ticket items.
How Do I Select Kitchen Cabinets Within My Desired Budget & Style?
Believe it or not, cabinets are a big piece of the custom home design and build process—especially when it comes to open floor plans. Back in the day, kitchens used to be hidden away. Now, cabinets have become a part of the entire aesthetic and theme of your home.
Unfortunately, this means they’re pricier than ever before.
For Springhouse, not only does this mean putting more time and work into making these cabinet selections, but getting them within a budget our clients feel comfortable with. Here’s what you can expect…
Preliminary Design & Design Development: Let’s Talk Details
The first time you’ll hear us talking about your kitchen is during the preliminary design step in phase one of the architectural process. When sketching and modeling your kitchen layout, we’ll meet to discuss where the kitchen will be, how it's connected to other spaces in your home, the circulation path, how many people will be using it, how you want to entertain from it, and more. The selection of your kitchen cabinets won’t happen at that time, but the placement will certainly come into play.
Once preliminary design is complete, we’ll get into the nitty-gritty details during the design development step in phase two. Where do the cookie sheets go? Are you right-handed or left-handed? How do you load the dishwasher? Do you want a pullout trash drawer? Do you want warming drawers? What about the microwave? You get the idea!
Cabinet Selection Pricing & Style
Shortly after design development, we’ll head to the pricing phase of selecting kitchen cabinets. Not only does this take your budget into account, but also what kind of brand, style and installer you want. Do you want it painted or stained? Do you want knife drawers? Cabinet separators? Pull-out shelves? That kind-of thing.
Translation? Everything has a price tag and everything is a pretty important decision.
What we typically do is meet with several cabinet suppliers—at least two or three. This helps us compare pricing, available selection, and overall service. When we meet with them, we'll make a few preliminary decisions, like seeing the same cabinets in different colors with roll-out drawers and soft-closed doors, for example.
The Goal: Always Plan Ahead
Every budget is as unique as your custom home—we won’t always use the same supplier with every client. True, cabinets may be more expensive these days, but there’s always a solution. Rushing through the process usually creates problems, especially when it comes to kitchen cabinet selection. We need to take the time to get to the bottom of your priorities and explore as many suppliers as we can. The design of your kitchen does not hinge on how much you're planning to spend. All we need to do is plan ahead!
How Can I Create an Environmentally Friendly Kitchen?
As you know, the kitchen is the heart of the home. This is where we gather, cook, talk, and interact with the people that are most important to us. It deserves our attention—especially when it comes to sustainable design. So, let’s get started!
Choosing Sustainable Kitchen Cabinets
When you're looking at the construction of your kitchen cabinets, many choose to go with a box construction that’s made out of hardwood. Hardwoods, especially tropical hardwoods, are a little difficult to obtain when it comes to transportation or renewability. Those are less of a sustainable option!
A cheaper, more sustainable option for your cabinets is to have the box be constructed out of MDF, or medium-density fiberboard, and then coated in a melamine, plastic laminate or wood veneer finish. MDF is more economical—however, it comes with some health concerns. There could be high levels of formaldehyde and other off-gassing chemicals. So, if you're going with an MDF cabinet, you want to choose something formaldehyde-free.
If you're not sure what’s considered sustainable, look for cabinets that are certified with the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC.
Choosing Sustainable Kitchen Countertops
When it comes to kitchen counters, a lot of our clients are moving towards natural stones, quartz and marbles. Although they’re beautiful pieces, one of the biggest issues we run into with quartz, or any other natural stone, is that they have an embodied energy—this means that the action it takes to obtain these materials is a lot of work that’s not sustainable for the environment. Not to mention, the transportation of these materials costs a lot (it requires many diesel trucks!).
If you’re looking for a more sustainable option, I’ve recently discovered a new manufacturer called Ice Stone that takes recycled products, like plastic bottles, paper, or other stones, and creates quartz and marble-like materials. Cambria also offers a countertop line made out of recycled stone, where they break it down into a powder and then form a new stone. It may be a bit more expensive, but it’s a beautiful, fantastic option!
Choosing Sustainable Kitchen Appliances
When it comes to sustainable appliances, there are many products on the market that are now certified through Energy Star, which help with your overall energy use.
By now, I'm sure a lot of you have heard that hand washing your dishes uses more water than a dishwasher does. Ergo, if you have an Energy Star dishwasher, it's going to use a lot less water! It also saves your hands from getting dried out from scrubbing food particles off of your plates.
What about your countertop appliances? Many of us love coffee—and one of the most sustainable ways to make your coffee is to use a French press or slow drip versus a coffee maker with a plug (it uses energy, after all). Don’t be afraid to come up with different ways to enjoy your food and drinks without having to use countertop electrical appliances.
Choosing Sustainable Kitchen Ventilation
You want to think about ventilating your appliances to the exterior of your home, making sure your range hood has the proper amount of CFMs, or cubic feet per minute. In a nutshell, cubic feet per minute determines how much air your range hood moves from the interior to the exterior. You want to aim for a nice high CFM—especially if you have a gas range. Gas can let off a lot of extra chemicals and smells into the air. However, that needs to be balanced with how much conditioned air you are evacuating. Use the hood fan as needed but remember to turn it off!
Choosing Sustainable Kitchen Flooring
If you’re looking for something more sustainable, try reclaimed wood. Although you’ll have some knots, nail and screw holes, you can fill them in with an epoxy or a resin. It really turns out beautifully!
You’ll also want to consider where you're purchasing your flooring. If you’re buying overseas, that's a lot of embodied energy when it comes to transportation back to the United States. Keep this in mind!
Choosing Sustainable Kitchen Lighting
Make sure you have the proper lighting for the task at hand—whether pendants over the kitchen island or recessed can lights above your work surfaces. Many of us are moving towards LEDs, which is a fantastic option. They last a lot longer and use less energy, making it quite sustainable for the environment. You also don't have to change your light bulbs nearly as much!
What Should I Expect When Appliance Shopping for My Custom Kitchen?
Before appliance shopping, you’ll be given a budget allowance, which is typically set by a builder. After looking back on budget estimates from past projects, I found that no matter the scope, the appliance budget sits at 2 – 3.5% of your entire project budget, which is interesting!
Armed with your allowance, you’ll be sent to the store with your appliance guru where you make your selections. When walking around the showroom, the expert will help you make a list of everything you like, then they’ll email it to you. Don’t be afraid to select a lot of them—you don't have to narrow it down that day. This way, you can sit down at night to look through the specs, prices and discounts.
How should I prepare?
First, make an accurate list of what you really want. Decide if you want a range, or a cooktop and wall ovens. Decide if you want freestanding refrigeration and counter depth or full depth. Once you know that, it's a very simple process to narrow things down and arrive at a brand.
If you’re doing a custom build, your builder might be buying the appliances for you. If that’s the case, are the appliances you want within your construction budget and your draw system from the bank? Are you paying cash for it? Is it a part of your construction loan? Who is paying for it? Are you buying an appliance off the floor? Are you getting some kind of deal that requires you to buy the appliance before it’s ready? Who’s storing this for you? (Keep in mind, builders don’t always have storage areas.) Also, who is installing it? Sometimes the appliance store wants to install it, but sometimes builders do it. Sometimes, nobody wants to take responsibility for installing it! Make sure these questions are answered before going shopping, so the store knows who to contact and where to send their estimates.
Lastly, you’ll want to ask your builder who is going to communicate the appliance specs with your cabinet designers. This is why appliances are the first selection you’ll make, because you have to know every single appliance you want built into your kitchen before you meet with the cabinet company. It really helps the process tremendously.
What Can I Expect When Renovating My Kitchen?
Even though we're a design/build firm, we started out as an architecture firm, so we’re truly ingrained in the architecture process. In other words, we take our time to design, plan, get our ducks in a row, answer questions, and consider the unknowns before we tear anything out. After that, we discuss pricing and construction. Let’s break this entire process down.
First Phase: Measuring and Documenting
When we first set out to renovate your kitchen, we’ll sit down for an initial meeting about design. This can either be done via Zoom, at our office, or at your home to walk through the space. During this time, our team will ask a few questions: What’s working for your space currently? What isn’t working for your space? What are your dreams? If there was no time limit or budget, what would you love for your kitchen to look like? How do you want to live in this space? How do you want to use it? How can it serve your life better? This meeting is all about listening to the client. We’re not spitting out ideas or solving problems—we want to understand where we’re heading. In a nutshell, you’re simply telling us why the current space isn’t working for you.
After we've had our initial meeting, we’ll send you a proposal and give you an estimate of what we think our architectural fees will be based on a budget estimate that we work through with you. If that's acceptable, we’ll come to your home and measure everything: depth, height, traffic patterns, etc. We’ll try to get a feel for how you’re using the space currently and document it all in our BIM program. If you happen to have existing drawings of your entire home, this will save you a lot of time and money—in some cases, your county or city may have a registered set of drawings from a building permit.
Second Phase: Dreaming, Sketching & Design
From there, based on your inspiration, we draft up preliminary designs, or sketches, which could include up to four options. Once those are complete, we set up a meeting with you to talk through them: What do you like about them? What do you dislike about them? Sometimes we meet twice so you have time to absorb the sketches.
Once our preliminary design meeting is wrapped up, we work on revisions. This is where we implement all of your feedback and move into design development, which is exactly what it sounds like: we develop the design a little more to work in extra details. We figure out where appliances will go, as well as storage decisions—we’re not selecting appliances or cabinets yet, but we know where drawers, doors and maybe even silverware will go.
Third Phase: Documenting and Pricing
Once design development is complete, we meet with you again. If things look good and revisions are complete, we move into the documentation phase. This is where we get a better idea of pricing. As a design/build firm, we will do the design and we’ll give you pricing based on our design. If you hire us as architects then we either help you find contractors or talk to your contractor and share the design with them to get pricing.
Keep in mind that through this entire process, everything is constantly changing, which means pricing is always changing, too. And we encourage this process! Together, we go back and forth with contractors and suppliers to make necessary revisions—which means we may have to tweak the pricing more than once.
In addition, we will go into construction documents where we sketch out all of the dimensions, as well as structural and code work required for permitting. All of this ensures that everyone knows exactly what to do.
Fourth Phase: Construction Process
Once we’ve created the designs for everyone to use, we then move into the construction process. This begins with the ordering phase—which happens to be the longest phase of your entire kitchen project. We want everything, and I mean everything, ordered with a firm delivery date before we move forward with anything else. We start with appliances, which have the longest lead time, then cabinets, plumbing fixtures, lighting fixtures, flooring, backsplash tile, and countertops.
As soon as all of those essentials are ordered, we move into framing—this requires full dust protection, prepping the space for demolition, taking out walls, putting in headers, widening openings, etc. We’ll meet to discuss what you want to salvage, what you don’t, where things are going to go, and how we’re going to stage it all.
Once framing is all in, but everything's still open, we’ll do a cabinet walkthrough and a lighting layout. We want to make sure everything's working exactly the way we expected. The last part of the framing stage is MEP: mechanical, electrical, plumbing.
The final leg of the construction process requires hanging drywall, painting, installing the cabinets, countertop templating and installation, interior trim, flooring, and backsplash. After the backsplash, we finish plumbing and electric, as well as installing appliances. This is followed by two days of clean-up, painting, fixing drawers, making sure things are straight, and then turning it over to the client.
All in all, the entire construction phase of your kitchen renovation takes around 24 days, which is around five weeks.
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