7 Mistakes People Make When Renovating a Kitchen

Redesigning your kitchen is no easy task. And if you live in the house while the kitchen is being remodeled, you’ll realize how important your kitchen is. You’ll be ordering takeout all the time and your children or spouse won’t be able to get their cold beer from the refrigerator whenever they want.

While all that is happening, you’ll need to make sure that you have enough storage in the kitchen so it supports your workflow. You want to make sure that the whole place is set up for multitasking, making sure your culinary space is just right, etc.

My goal with this article is to help you steer clear of these major mistakes we’ve made when remodeling our kitchen.

1. Not Thinking Of An Overall Coherent Design Of Your Home

You want to make sure that your kitchen design is coherent with the age and the overall style of your house. It would look weird if your house had this old-timey design to it but your kitchen looks like a hi-tech James Bond cave. Design-wise, it wouldn’t make sense.

You want to make sure that the overall design and character of your kitchen compliments what you’ve done with the rest of your house. So it looks like a part of your house rather than apart (see what I did there?).

So if your house has a minimalist modern design, then do the same thing with your kitchen.

2. Trying To Get Your Dining Spot In the Kitchen Itself

This is the worst mistake you can make.

Most people think that you HAVE to have a dining spot in your kitchen itself. And while that is a lot more convenient, it isn’t necessary.

If your kitchen does not have a lot of spare space, it is okay to have a dining spot in another place. Maybe in your living room or any other room. The main thing you should be focusing on when it comes to space in your kitchen is to make sure that nothing will be blocking your workflow.

If you think a dining area will do that, don’t add it to your kitchen.

3. Not Thinking About Lighting

Having proper lighting in your kitchen is so important. It’s probably more important to have good lighting in your kitchen than any other room in the house (unless you’re a YouTuber, then yes you’ll need good lighting in your room as well).

You want to make sure that your kitchen not only has a good amount of lighting, it should also be stylish and should go with the rest of the design.

But that’s for when the sunsets. During the daytime, you want to make sure that there’s enough natural light coming in as well. It will look weird if there’s no way to get natural light in your kitchen. It would look like you’re cooking food in a dungeon.

Trust me, we have made that mistake before and we had to spend a couple of grand to fix it.

4. Focusing Too Much On Trends

Trends are important. You don’t want to look like you’re this old family that doesn’t know what’s going on in the world right now. But here’s the thing about trends – they come and go. That’s the reason why we call them trends and not a guideline to build the best kitchen.

Guidelines never change. But trends, they change every 10 years or so.

And most people only remodel their kitchens or houses once or twice in their lifetime. So sure, you want to take into account what’s in trend at the time you’ll be remodeling your kitchen, but you also want to think about things that will stand the test of time.

If you want to add some funky color scheme to your kitchen, my recommendation would be to add them through small accessories or home appliances. Something that can be easily swapped out once the trend goes away.

You don’t want any of these things in the foundational design of your kitchen, that would be a huge mistake.

5. Your Design Doesn’t Match With Your Lifestyle

The designs you look at in the magazines, they are made to look attractive. Even the kitchens that you see in your favorite TV shows or movies are sets designed by professional designers to make sure that they look amazing for the short scene that they’ll be shooting in there.

Your day-to-day life just wouldn’t work right with that design. And that is true for most people. That’s the reason why I recommend trying to balance out the best design with functionality that is customized for you.

At the end of the day, you and your family will be the ones spending the most amount of time in that kitchen, not the magazine photographers or the actors you saw in that TV show or movie.

So things like countertops or floors, it is best to go with something that isn’t easily breakable or gets stained easily. If you have young children in your house, then going with marble is the best way to end up spending more money down the line because marble stains easily and it can also break easily compared to an indestructible quartz flooring.

Also, avoid having sharp corners on anything in your kitchen whether you have young children or not. It’s just not practical to have that because then you’re increasing your chances of getting hurt by those corners. You want to focus on cooking the best food and not saving yourself from getting hurt.

6. Buying Appliances Last

This is one mistake that I have seen some of my smartest friends make as well. They will go through the whole kitchen remodel without even talking about the appliances. They want to make sure that the cabinets and everything else are just perfect so their workflow is unhindered.

And then they go out looking for appliances to fit into those places rather than having the measurements beforehand so they could make sure that these new appliances will easily fit into those corners.

Don’t make this mistake. Either buy your appliances before planning the whole thing out or at least go to the store and get the measurements of every big appliance that you’re planning on buying so you can make sure that there’s enough space in the kitchen for you to have it in there.

The last thing you want is to have to break the newly made design to make room for the new refrigerator or the cooking range you just bought.

7. Not Thinking About Plumbing

When you’re planning your kitchen, make sure that you plan it from the ground up.

What do I mean by ground up?

Start with the practical things first. Things like making sure that whatever you’re designing is easier to implement rather than having to move all the plumbing around because now you want to move the dishwasher and your washing machine to someplace else.

That would almost double or triple the cost of the remodel and it also won’t guarantee that you won’t have any leakage issues in the future.

So when you’re designing your kitchen, it’s always best to have a plumber and a kitchen redesigner available with you so you can plan these things out in real-time.