How much does a kitchen remodel cost? The four decisions that set your number

This is the largest single lever and it is usually settled in one sentence. Keeping the sink and range where they are means the work stays above the floor. Moving the sink means opening the floor, rerouting drain and supply, and meeting current code on everything you touch. In a house over a crawlspace that is manageable. In a slab-on-grade home it means cutting concrete, which is a different order of cost entirely. Ask which foundation you have before you sketch a new layout.

Cabinetry is typically the largest line item in a kitchen. The spread between stock, semi-custom and full custom is enormous, and there is a third path most people skip: if the existing boxes are sound — and in a well-built house from the seventies or eighties they frequently are — refacing or replacing doors and drawer fronts delivers most of the visual change for a fraction of the cost. Have someone assess the carcasses before assuming they are scrap.

Induction ranges, second ovens and EV chargers all land on the same constraint: the service panel. Homes built before the late nineties commonly carry panels sized for a very different household. A load calculation during design costs almost nothing. A service upgrade discovered on installation day, with cabinets already delivered, costs both money and weeks.

Behind the cabinets in a pre-1980 kitchen you can reasonably expect some combination of a single circuit doing the work of three, no ground on the outlets nearest the sink, a vent that terminates in the wall cavity, and a subfloor softened by a dishwasher that has been weeping quietly for years. None of these are exotic. All of them become line items the moment demolition starts, which is why a bid with no allowance for concealed conditions is not really a bid.

Tile, tap finish, cabinet hardware, paint colour. These absorb a wildly disproportionate share of homeowner attention and a small share of the budget. Spending three weeks choosing between two backsplashes while the question of whether the sink moves stays open is the most common way a kitchen project loses time without saving anything.

Not on overspending at the showroom. Budgets break at the step from a mid-range remodel to a full one — the point where the layout changes and permits, inspections and structural work enter. People plan a mid-range project, decide midway that the wall really should come out, and discover they have crossed into a different tier. Decide that question before demolition, not during it.

Write the scope down before you ask anyone to price it. Specify whether fixtures move, who supplies appliances and cabinetry, what the allowances are, whether the panel is being upgraded, and what happens if the subfloor is found damaged. Hand the same page to each contractor. Without that you are not comparing three prices for one job — you are comparing three different projects that happen to share a room.

Ten to twenty per cent held back for concealed conditions. In a house built before 1980, treat that as a likelihood rather than a precaution. The homeowners who finish on budget are almost always the ones who planned for the surprise, not the ones who avoided it.

Cabinetry is usually both the largest line item and the longest lead time, and it determines the critical path for everything after demolition. Stock cabinets can arrive in days. Semi-custom commonly runs several weeks. Full custom can run months. The most expensive scheduling mistake is ordering cabinets after demolition rather than before. The crew then waits, and you live without a kitchen for the length of the lead time on top of the actual build. Order early, accept a few weeks of storage, and the project shortens by exactly that much.

This surprises nearly everyone and it is worth planning around. Stone and quartz counters are templated once the cabinet boxes are installed and levelled, because at that scale a few millimetres of variance matters. That creates a gap — commonly one to three weeks — where you have base cabinets and no work surface. It is normal, it is not your contractor stalling, and knowing about it in advance turns a frustrating fortnight into an expected one. Ask for the templating date at the start so you can plan around it.

Cabinet runs are built to specific appliance dimensions. An older refrigerator or range that is even slightly non-standard forces either a filler panel that looks wrong or a late redesign, and both cost more than replacing the appliance would have. If an appliance is anywhere near the end of its life, replacing it during the remodel is dramatically cheaper than doing it afterwards. And if you are switching fuel types, that decision has to be made before electrical and gas rough-in, not after.

Demolition is the honest DIY win. Removing cabinets, pulling flooring and hauling debris is unskilled, time-consuming work that contractors bill at full labour rates. Doing it yourself can save real money with no risk to the outcome. Painting is a reasonable second. Almost everything else is a false economy: plumbing, electrical, cabinet installation and tile all fail expensively when done imperfectly, and several of them need permits and inspections that require a licensed contractor anyway.

Material costs are broadly national — cabinets, appliances, tile and counters cost roughly what they cost anywhere. What varies is labour, permit fees, and the local cost of the trades your project needs. That is why national cost calculators are directionally useful and locally unreliable. Use them to understand the ratio between tiers, not to predict your number. Three local bids on a written scope will tell you more than any calculator.

If the budget will not stretch to everything, sequence by what is hardest to redo. Anything behind a wall — plumbing, electrical, ventilation — should be done now, because reaching it later means undoing finished work. Surfaces are the opposite. Counters, backsplash, flooring and even cabinet doors can be upgraded later with far less disruption. Homeowners who spend a constrained budget on visible finishes and defer the rough-in almost always pay for that decision twice.