Kitchen Renovation Step By Step
How to prepare a room for installing furniture, where to start and what not to forget so that the renovation goes smoothly and the kitchen turns out perfect
Most often, we have to change the interior and furniture after moving to a new apartment, or because 10-20 years have passed since the previous renovation, and you want to refresh the interiors. It does not matter what kind of renovation you have in mind: a local one in the kitchen or you are planning a global "reconstruction" affecting all the rooms. The advice of our expert, director of the service department of the company "Stylish Kitchens and Interiors" Alexey Lesovoy will help you avoid unnecessary expenses and meet adequate deadlines.
Step 1. Define your “wants”
In our company, we call "wishlists" what inspires each of us to do renovations. This is a dream about an ideal home. Yes, we want the house to be cozy, and the new furniture to be convenient to use. What else?
The first step is to analyze not only your preferences, but also your features and habits. This is what will determine, for example, the height of the countertop or the depth of the upper cabinets in the new kitchen. The highest countertop we installed for customers was 100 cm from the floor, with an average of 85-90 cm. And the reason is simple: the owner of the apartment and the customer of the new kitchen is a tall basketball player. In the previous kitchen, where the countertop was a standard height, he felt very uncomfortable.
Step 2. Create a design project
Once the wishes for the future kitchen are defined, we draw up a design project. You can do it yourself, but it is much better to seek help from professionals - an interior designer or furniture manufacturers, if they provide such a service.
A design project is a document that determines not only the beauty but also the functionality of the future kitchen. It allows you to understand in advance:
where the lamps, sockets, and switches will be installed;
where and how the cabinets will be located, what depth they will be;
where will the outlet for water and sewerage be, are you planning to install a sink, dishwasher and washing machine near the existing outlets or do you need to pull pipes through the entire kitchen;
will the hob and sink argue with each other because they are placed unacceptably close to each other;
what height will the facades be on the upper tier, will they open to the left, to the right, or will they fold upwards and will they not damage the ceiling or walls.
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Clients come to the Stylish Kitchens and Interiors company with varying degrees of room readiness: it can be an old renovation, a new finishing renovation or a rough renovation without utility lines. If you contact a furniture company at the planning stage, our designers will help you decide where the outlets for the dishwasher or washing machine should be, where and what sockets should be installed in the kitchen. By calling a surveyor at this stage, the client will receive accurate calculations of all distances and angles, and will understand where to align the walls so that the furniture fits tightly to the wall, where the sockets will be located on the wall panel, and where the utilities will be.
The first draft of the interior design can and should be amended to perfection. With the project in hand, you need to go into the room and compare reality with the picture. Figure out how the furniture, appliances, lighting elements, and accents will be placed in the kitchen space. And answer the question: is this what I want or do I need to improve something? If the project seems perfect, you can start the renovation.
Step 3. Make a renovation plan and decide on a budget
This is especially important if the renovation will affect not only the kitchen, but the entire apartment. The fact is that global renovations usually start with the most necessary, important and difficult areas - the kitchen and bathroom. But if you do not plan the work processes, it may turn out that finished furniture for these areas will be installed in an unfinished room. As a real case from practice shows, this can harm the furniture.
The clients ordered the kitchen at the renovation stage, and 14 days later they confirmed their readiness to accept it. We delivered the furniture, but the builders let the clients down and did not have time to complete the renovation work. The kitchen furniture installation area was given a final finish, but not the rest of the apartment: the walls were not installed everywhere, the screed was not done, and the electrics were not done.
The customers decided to install the kitchen anyway. The expensive purchase was carefully covered with polyethylene film and they continued plastering, drilling and chasing in other rooms. However, the unspoken rule of renovation is: any horizontal surface can be used. The workers placed tools, put buckets of plaster, in general, used the expensive countertop of the new kitchen as a workbench. And by the end of the renovation, the new kitchen was no longer very new.
The type of renovation will determine what the work plan will be. Major renovations involve tearing down and building up walls, changing utilities, flooring, and windows. The cosmetic renovation plan is shorter: you need to repaint the ceiling, re-glue the wallpaper, and replace outdated furniture and appliances.
In the kitchen, renovation without a plan can lead to gross errors that will have to be redone later. A specific example is the kitchen door. If you decide to do without it and do the renovation "by eye", and your kitchen stove is gas, then at the request of the Housing Inspectorate the door will still have to be installed - according to the fresh renovation. This threatens unaccounted expenses, possible damage to the walls, and sometimes additional work if the height of the kitchen and hallway floors differs.
Once you have a plan of all the necessary work, you can easily calculate how much the repairs will cost you.
Step 4. Beginning the renovation: dismantling and redevelopment
Major repairs begin with dismantling everything unnecessary: non-load-bearing walls, radiators, windows, old flooring, etc. At this stage, redevelopment is also done.
What can and cannot be changed in the kitchen?
In the kitchen, any redevelopment that affects gas, sewer, water and ventilation communications must be coordinated with the relevant organizations.
For example, you can't just move a gas hob or oven. Or knock down a wall and install a sink in the next room. And it's better to immediately abandon the idea of swapping the kitchen and bedroom: you can't turn a living space into a non-residential one.
The sink in the kitchen can be moved to any corner. But in order for the water to drain easily, a slope is needed - 1 cm per 1 linear meter of pipes. The optimal location of the height of the sewer hole is 350 mm from the level of the finished floor, if it is higher, there is a high probability that water will stagnate in the sink.
It is strictly forbidden to make changes to the ventilation system of a residential building. This means that it is forbidden to block, narrow, or move the ventilation opening to the side. In kitchens in apartment buildings, it is strictly forbidden to connect anything to the opening of the common house ventilation, including plastic pipes or corrugated hoods. The solution is to install the hood in recirculation mode.
Ventilation boxes also cannot be dismantled. In our practice, there were stories when clients ordered a kitchen and did not inform us that there was once a ventilation box in place of the wall, which the customers demolished. The kitchen was installed, and after some time the client came to us again and said: help restore everything, because the housing inspectorate came and issued an order to redo everything.
Step 5. Communications and new structures
When everything unnecessary is eliminated, new structures are built. If there were no redevelopments during the renovation, they start laying communications - water and electricity.
Plumbing
At this stage of the renovation, the customer of the kitchen should finally decide where the sink, dishwasher, waste disposer will be located, and in some cases, the washing machine, if you decide to install it in the kitchen.
The design project will help determine the location of "wet zones". The design project from the company "Stylish Kitchens and Interiors" will indicate specific models of household appliances and their type of connection. This will help workers to correctly lay communications, and when installing the kitchen, the connection of all large household appliances will be fast and high-quality.
Read the article “Top 10 Mistakes in Kitchen Renovations” to find out what mistakes our installation teams most often encounter when installing a kitchen.
Electricity
At this stage of the renovation, wires are pulled around the apartment: electrical, for television, the Internet, and the like. At this point, the terminals for the sockets in the kitchen are installed in their future places: for the hood, the grinder, the lighting, for large and small household appliances.
Strengthening the walls
Modern construction uses materials that can easily withstand the weight of kitchen cabinets. But if the customer suddenly erected walls from plasterboard, to install the upper tier of the furniture set, they will have to be strengthened by putting plywood underneath. And this can only be done at this stage of the renovation, it will not work later. We will especially talk about the renovation of the kitchen of a new wooden country house. There, to install the upper cabinets, it is necessary to use a floating frame to take into account the amendment for the upcoming shrinkage of the house.
At the same time, plasterboard ceilings and structures for sliding partitions are installed, if such are provided for in the project.
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Step 6. Plastering and painting works
Surface alignment starts with the ceiling, then comes alignment of the walls. You can align by eye or using beacons. The second is more expensive, but the angles are exactly 90 degrees. And you can't do without it if:
it is planned to hang cabinets in the kitchen, and it is important that there are no voids or gaps between the back wall of the cabinet and the wall;
you want to paint the walls with a fashionable matte paint or apply decorative plaster, rather than wallpaper them;
you will need to lay tiles on the walls, for example, a kitchen backsplash above the work area;
if you are a perfectionist and the 89 degree angle hurts your eyes.
This is also the time for tiling work: ceramic tiles are laid on the floor, mosaic walls are laid out, and an apron is made from tiles or ceramics.
The most important thing at this stage is to follow the technological processes. For example, when plastering walls, all layers must be primed, and all drying cycles must be observed. Did you speed up the process, did not dry for 12 hours? The surface will become a favorable zone for the formation of fungi, or in the future, microcracks may appear on the finish.
Step 7. Finishing
At this stage of the renovation, wallpaper is pasted, the ceiling and walls are painted, the floor is laid, the door is installed, light fixtures are hung, sockets and switches are installed, baseboards are attached and curtain rods are hung.
It is important to select wear-resistant materials for the kitchen area. The kitchen area is a place with very active life, where things are periodically dropped, broken, splashes fall on the wall. Therefore, the wall finish should be such that it can be easily restored or washed.
Matte paints are not the most practical material for the kitchen, it is better to decorate the walls in the living room or bedroom. Matte walls are very beautiful in the picture, but in use they are very capricious. For the kitchen, especially for the stove, sink and work area, it is better to choose ceramic cladding, tiles, laminated chipboard panels and other practical and at the same time beautiful finishing materials.
Step 8. Installing sockets
Installing sockets is a signal that furniture can be installed. Before that, it is not allowed: cabinets can block access to socket boxes.
Sometimes our furniture installation teams face this situation. The client says that they can come: the repairs are done, the floor tiles are laid, the ceilings are stretched, the walls are in order. But the sockets are not installed. And either we all wait together for the electrician who installs 15 sockets, or we postpone the installation of the already delivered kitchen to another day. The furniture will have to be stored in the next room, the team will have to spend another day on the visit, and the client will have to wait a little longer for his dream kitchen.
Step 9. Installing furniture
On the day of finishing the kitchen renovation, we deliver the furniture. The Stylish Kitchens and Interiors company strictly fulfills its obligations: if we said that the furniture would be ready in 14 days, then in exactly 14 days it will be ready for installation. We do not have a warehouse where the finished kitchen will wait until the client is ready to accept it. In order not to store the furniture disassembled in one of the rooms, plan the stages of the renovation, setting aside a little time for the situation if “something went wrong.