A Truly Green Kitchen…your Friends Will Envy
As a kitchen designer for the last eight years, shoulder to shoulder with my clients I have battled a myriad of kitchen remodeling challenges: soffits, out of level floors, windows over stoves, chimneys and pipe chases to name a few. I love it when my client rattles off five or six things about their existing kitchen design that they absolutely hate. I now know exactly what to avoid in their kitchen remodel, and I know there is nothing I have found yet that I can’t fix with a new kitchen layout! I never looked for alternative solutions such as kitchen refacing, why would I? Selling cabinets was part of my job. And if anyone brought up kitchen refacing, it became very clear: I was a kitchen cabinet refacing snob.
If asked, I would explain simply to the customer, that the kitchen refacing process was nearly as expensive as a full kitchen remodel, and after all the mess and inconvenience involved in kitchen reface, you ended up with basically the same kitchen design you had before, who would want that? The kitchen cabinet refacing service provided by most companies, I explained pretty much like this:
remove old doors and drawers fronts
sand cabinet surfaces,
smear with glue,
slap up plain laminate
install new doors and drawer fronts
leave customer with same old floor, counter top, layout and basic look
…and then, the nice folks generally purchased a new kitchen. The neighbors new it was coming the moment I had a 30 yard dumpster dropped in Mr. and Mrs. Happy Kitchen-Customers driveway. A typical kitchen remodel takes between six and twelve weeks, and the dumpster often remains there for almost the whole time, just to be sure that all the debris was properly removed.
