FREE NEWSLETTER
I’VE WRITTEN BEFORE about the financial benefits of learning to cook and then preparing meals at home, rather than frequently eating out. I still heartily endorse that notion. Still, our recent decision to remodel our kitchen can’t be defended as a wise financial choice.
In fact, the consensus is that almost all remodeling jobs result in an increase in home value that’s less than the remodeling project’s cost, and that includes kitchen renovations. Instead, our latest home project was an emotional and enjoyment expenditure, one that I owed to my wife, an expert cook and very patient woman. Our home was built in 1986 and we moved in a few years after that. The kitchen hadn’t had any major updates since then.
The biggest factor in a remodeling project’s success is the general contractor, so our first step was to find a good one. Ideally, you have a trusted friend or family member who says, “This is the guy. He just handled our project and he’s great.” But we didn’t know anybody who had a general contractor they’d recommend.
Nextdoor, Yelp, Google and so on can all be helpful in identifying potential contractors. The guy we ultimately chose had an extensive website. He later told me I was the first person who’d actually read the whole thing.
Still, what drove our decision was the contractor’s references. I spoke at length with three clients. Each was obviously intelligent, articulate and made no bones about being demanding. They all sang our guy’s praises. We were sold.
We’ve now finished the project, and we’re as happy with our contractor as his references were. With the benefit of hindsight, I can now list his attributes that were most important to me:
The hard part for anyone shopping for a contractor: How do you judge in advance whether a candidate has the attributes that are important to you? Without doubt, the best way is talking at length with references. Take the time to ask them to grade your prospect on every attribute that’s important to you. I promise you that, later on, you’ll be happy you did.
Andrew Forsythe retired in 2017 after almost four decades practicing criminal law in Austin, Texas, first as a prosecutor and then as a defense attorney. His wife Rosalinda and he, along with their dog, live outside Austin, at the edge of the Texas Hill Country. Their four kids are now grown, independent and successful. They’re also blessed with five beautiful grandkids. Andrew loves dogs, and enjoys collecting pocketknives and flashlights. Check out his earlier articles.
Want to receive our weekly newsletter? Sign up now. How about our daily alert about the site's latest posts? Join the list.
We live in a 110 year old house and we anticipated when planning our kitchen remodel that there would likely be many repairs and redo’s that would be necessary. Boy, was that an understatement! On the plus side, we hired an architect to help plan the project who was able to recommend several GC’s whom she had worked with extensively in the past. We picked one and were completely satisfied with the end result. I can’t imagine having tried to do this on our own and, based on many annecdotal horror stories of failed kitchen remodels, am very glad we didn’t try.
Glad your project was a success. We likewise feared becoming one of those horror stories. We feel very lucky to have found the contractor we did.
This brought back memories. We also remodeled the kitchen of our 80s-era house back in 2018. It cost a LOT of money, and then in a plot twist, we ended up selling the house and moving in 2019, so there is no way we recouped the costs, though I know the buyers adored our kitchen. And why not—it was fabulous.
I planned for five weeks of no kitchen like I was Ma Ingalls preparing for the Long Winter. I bought a microwave from Target and we moved the refrigerator into the den until the new one was installed. I put up a bunch of freezer meals that I could cook in my Instant Pot. I froze triple batches of egg bites and pancake bites for breakfasts that could be reheated in the microwave.
The part I underestimated was doing dishes. It’s hard to properly clean an Instant Pot in the bathtub or with a garden hose. We gave up pretty quickly and did a lot