How to Completely Remodel a Kitchen for Under $4,000 (Part 2)

In the previous article in this series, I looked at factors to consider when deciding whether and to what extent a real estate investor should remodel a kitchen. With our property, No Basement, Mike and I decided to completely renovate the kitchen using a budget of just $4,000. In this article, I’ll be writing about the next step: design and materials selection.

Designing an Inexpensive Kitchen Remodel

It is in the design phase that many investors go wrong. The wrong design decisions can quickly add thousands of dollars to a project both in material and labor costs. They can also delay the rehab process if they add additional inspection requirements to the project. So we follow some basic rules of thumb when designing a new kitchen:

Rule #1: Never move a load-bearing wall unless there is no other option. To this I should add Rule #1.5—there is almost always another option. Moving load bearing walls, and particularly exterior walls, require the services of an engineer during the design phase and additional inspections by your local government. Professional fees, inspections, and construction costs to move a load-bearing wall could break the bank and delay the project by weeks, if not months. On a $4,000 budget, it’s not an option.

Rule #2: Stick to the original kitchen layout as much as reasonably possible. This is not the time to be creative. If the original kitchen layout works reasonably well, keep it. Any substantial redesign in the layout will almost certainly mean re-routing plumbing and electrical. Keeping the existing layout will save time during the design phase and will reduce complexity and costs of the project.

Rule #3: Use as much of the existing kitchen as you can. In No Basement, Mike and I considered keeping the original floor. In the end, we replaced it, but it was a close call. If you can design the new kitchen in a way that allows you to keep parts of the old kitchen, you can save even more money.

Rule #4: Improve functionality in the cabinet configuration. While the overall kitchen layout will likely stay the same, there’s always some room to change the cabinet configuration. We’ve seen numerous builder designs and bad remodels that don’t make sensible use of the existing space. Home-improvement retailers typically offer free design assistance. You’ll need the kitchen measurements and a quick crash course on standard cabinet sizes, but then you can change up the cabinet configuration pretty easily. Here are a couple of quick ideas. Make sure there’s a drawer set. Builders somehow manage to skip this on homes with some regularity. Change out a blind corner to an easier access lazy-susan. Consider a tall pantry cabinet when the kitchen doesn’t have a closet-style pantry built in. And here’s one we used for No Basement. The kitchen is an L-shape, which generally means a dead space at the corner. We flipped the direction of a cabinet at the corner to add some extra storage and used a wider counter-top that created a breakfast bar. Kitchens sell. A more functional cabinet configuration within the existing layout will help bring buyers and keep tenants.

Picking Inexpensive Yet Durable Materials

Once you’ve chosen the layout of your new kitchen, selecting the right materials is critical to staying within your budget. The four major costs to most kitchen remodels are cabinets, appliances, flooring and labor. We’ll leave the labor part for now, but here’s how we choose the materials.

Cabinets: When Mike and I tackled the first kitchen remodel, I was totally unaware of how inexpensive good quality cabinets can be. We buy pre-finished, stock cabinets, typically from Lowe’s. These cabinets come off the shelf, ready for installation by our contractor. We have a commercial 30-day account at Lowe’s that gives us a 10% discount on most purchases, including cabinets and about everything else we’ll need in the kitchen. The cabinets look good, are durable, and inexpensive.

Appliances: We provide appliances in all of our rental units. It seems odd to me that somebody would rent a single family home without appliances, but I know landlords who still don’t provide them. The market dictates the rule here. In our area, renters of single-family homes sometimes furnish their own refrigerator and stove, but the market is trending towards all kitchen appliances coming with the home. If you really want to “design on a dime,” 86 the fridge and stove, and offer to provide them as an option, with an additional rent charge. As a built-in appliance, a dishwasher is pretty much standard either way, but also the least expensive of the set. We provide a full appliance set in all of our homes with the idea that it completes the overall visual picture and helps bring the renters, and higher rents, that much quicker.

We buy our appliances from a local discount appliance store. (Even with the discount, Lowe’s doesn’t always hit the price point on appliances). We’re happy with the floor model if it’s in good shape, and it saves us even more money. We still stick with the recognized brands, and we’re looking to beat builder grade. For No Basement we bought stainless appliances for just a few extra bucks over the standard plain-jane white.

Flooring: Here we splurged and imported marble tiles from Italy. Well that was my idea, but Mike chose instead to import some vinyl flooring from a local flooring store. He has no imagination. But it turns out that he can pick some of the finest linoleum in the tri-state area. The flooring tends toward the neutral, but is a cut above builder grade and actually looks good. Ceramic tile is an option. It may win on durability but probably not, even in the long-run, on cost.

In the third and final article, I’ll discuss how we select a contractor, sum up the costs of the project, and suggest a few inexpensive ways to set the kitchen apart from the competition. I’ll also show you some pictures of the finished product at No Basement. Until then, if you’ve renovated a kitchen, drop us a comment about your project. Better still, send in some pictures, and we’ll include them in the next article.

Photo Credit: onebyjude

Tagged as: inexpensive kitchen remodel, rental unit kitchen remodel