How We Remodeled Our Kitchen On A Budget

Somehow I forgot to mention on my blog that we were having our kitchen remodeled!  We have been wanting to have it done for the longest time and finally the stars aligned and we saved up enough money to make it happen!  After a month of construction (which was unbearable at times) we are finally done!

We got great deals on the labor and supplies so we ended up doing the whole kitchen for $5200!  After thinking about it I realized we got these deals by doing one little thing … talking about the fact that we wanted a new kitchen.  You can easily forget the power of word-of-mouth and just how far it can get you.

We had first mentioned that we would like to redo our kitchen to Mr. Juicefairy’s brother-in-law.  We thought maybe we could get some tips from him since he works for a home builder.  He surprised us by saying that he could order cabinets from the cabinet maker his company uses, at a wholesale price for us.  After sending a drawing of our kitchen to the cabinet maker they made up a blueprint with a suggested cabinet layout.  The bonus was that the price was more than 50% below retail! For $100 they shipped all of the cabinets direct to our house, assembled already.

Then we needed the labor.  Once again it started with a gripe to a friend about how high a quote came in for some bathroom work we needed done.  He reminded us that his brother-in-law, John, is a handyman/general contractor and passed along his number.  We ended up hiring him for the bathroom and decided to ask him about doing our kitchen as well.  He gave and gave us a “friend” discount and did great on the price for the whole kitchen said and done … no last minute additions.

While John working up the estimate he mentions that he is getting married early next year.  Our wheels start turning and mention that we are part time wedding photographers.  He ended up liking our work so half of his fee we did for a trade — labor on the kitchen for us shooting his wedding.

Everything was coming together really well but we still needed to find someone to install counter-tops.  Again, at work I mentioned to a co-worker while making idle chit chat that we were getting the ball rolling on a kitchen remodel.  He, of course, knows a guy.  After a few phone calls back and forth we decide we like his estimate and find out we can go straight to the granite supply and pick out a remnant, or and piece of granite leftover from a bigger job that was unused.  This would save us a lot of money.

All in all the kitchen ended up taking a bit longer than planned because we hired several companies instead on one contractor that specializes in kitchen remodel, but doing it this way was well worth the money.  I am so happy with the way it turned out and it has made cooking a lot more fun!