Avoiding Kitchen Remodel Hell: Part One

You’ve probably heard that remodeling your kitchen can be a nightmare, or perhaps
you’ve gone through kitchen renovation hell yourself.  Here’s why it happens.  Highly designed kitchens are complicated, technical spaces that need plumbing, gas, power, and a myriad of fixtures, appliances and cabinetry that all must fit and work together seamelssly.  If any one of them are damaged, defective, the wrong model, out-of-stock or incorrectly installed, there will be delays.  

Think about a refrigerator.  It just has to fit.  Seems easy.

BUT in a highly designed kitchen, the tolerances are narrow and specific to the model, in width, height, depth, manner of installation (flush vs. standard) and the location of the outlet and water supply.  If a panel surrounding the refrigerator is warped, the refrigerator won’t slide in.  If there was any misunderstanding regarding the electrical or plumbing locations (which go in early) there will be some last minute chaos or worse.  

Once the refrigerator is in, the doors and their handles have to swing clear and not hit walls or counters.  As easy as this seems to avoid, if the plans are not carefully proofed, it happens.  These are only some of the things that can go wrong.  They may seem overblown, but they happen, and some of them, like mis-sized cabinets, can cause months of delay.

3 Things a Company Needs to
Avoid Kitchen Renovation Hell

1 

Excellent craftsmen who take their time to do things right and can recognize issues early.

2 

Well-thought-out design, carefully reviewed in a multi-step process to make sure all the parts coordinate.  

3

Seamless communication between the designers, the logistic team, the woodshop, and the field teams.  
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Snags are inevitable with so many moving parts, but a highly integrated system helps catch them and correct them.

Here’s How We Work at Habitar Design.

 
Your kitchen starts as a concept developed by you and your designer.  From there, it’s developed into an exact set of plans and specifications where every element is defined and drawn in 3D.  This is not only for you to get a good idea of how your kitchen will look, it also enables us to spot issues.

Every one of our teams looks them over, starting with the bidding team who measures them and prices each element.  Afterward, the cabinetry shop and field construction team will both check the design documents against field conditions.  Each team marks up the drawings and each see the work of other teams which are kept in the cloud.

As the drawings are bid, each design element becomes a line on a spreadsheet.  Two new pendant lights?  There will be a line for them with a price for each one.  If they’re out of stock, there will be a comment and other team members will talk to the designer and clients to find an alternative.  Together, our teams raise issues, discuss them, and craft solutions using these lines.

By the time a bid is complete, a kitchen spreadsheet may have hundreds of lines.  If the pricing is acceptable, after necessary modifications, it becomes the scope of work in the construction contract and the back bone of our project management and accounting process.

Over the course of bidding, field checking, gathering materials, and changes directed by clients or demanded by field conditoins, lines are updated dozens of times creating record of everything that has taken place during a project.  That’s a lot of information moving around.  Imagine all that handled with telephones, texts, email and sticky notes.  That’s a lot of communciaiton that can get lost. 

Our way ensures it doesn’t.  We rethought how construction should be bid and tracked, which explains our eighteen years of accolades.  This system along with our great team of professionals makes it happen.

Let us take you from this…

…to THIS!