It is the busiest room in the house and often needs the most improvement: the kitchen. A remodeled kitchen increases the value of the home and makes it more enjoyable to cook, live and dine in. However, many homeowners are left wondering how to create the culinary oasis of their dreams on a budget.

---

---

“Just about everyone has cost concerns when it comes to remodeling. Very few people have unlimited budgets, so doing research on various options will go a long way to stretching your dollars,” says Connie Edwards, certified kitchen and bathroom designer and director of design for Shenandoah Cabinetry. Edwards offers some valuable tips for controlling costs when remodeling the kitchen.

* Do as much of the work yourself as you can. Wallpaper removal, light demolition, and cleaning up after subcontractors require hard work as opposed to skill; there is no point in paying skilled contractors to clean up.

* Buy stock cabinets. Instead of having cabinets custom-made, find a line of stock cabinets that you like. Shenandoah Cabinetry, sold exclusively at Lowe’s, is a stock cabinet manufacturer that offers a wide range of premium construction features and accessories at a value price.

* Use alternative materials instead of costly marble or stone. Laminate countertops and vinyl flooring create rich-looking surfaces on a modest budget. When choosing faucets, brushed and polished chrome is vastly less expensive than more exotic finishes, and basic white fixtures are budget friendly and won’t look dated in a decade.

* “Wow” the island. The island is the first thing that people notice when they walk into the kitchen, so keep the main cabinets simple and put the emphasis on the island. Make the island pop by increasing the thickness of the countertop, using a premium finish or glaze on just the island cabinetry, or illuminating the island with inexpensive but attractive pendant lights.

* Work within your existing space. Annexing space from an adjacent room or removing a wall can be costly, so add storage and organization features to new cabinets to utilize space you already have. Many of these accessories are now factory installed, such as those offered in Shenandoah’s OrganizationOptions program, making things simpler for the consumer and easier on their wallet.

* Use moderately priced items in an interesting way. Small splurges in small spaces like a glass tile backsplash behind the oven range will spruce up the kitchen and is the best use of your dollars.

* Consult a design professional. A design professional can help you avoid costly mistakes and ensure the job is done efficiently.

Getting a new kitchen may seem like heaven, but if you commit some common kitchen-planning sins, you may spend your remodeling project in you-know-where.

Kitchen designers may be trained to help customers avoid mistakes, but they all have war stories of being brought into projects only after big problems arise. What are the kitchen-planning gaffes they see most often?

1. “Appliance Fever”– This commonly occurs when clients insist on having a 72-inch Viking range in an 8- by 10-foot kitchen. They may have six burners, but nowhere to store a pan. This problem can usually be fixed by choosing appliance options like double oven ranges, dishwashers that are incorporated into the sink, counter-depth refrigerators, and even under-the-counter refrigerators. A kitchen’s cabinet space can be planned down to the square inch, as well, with products like Decora’s “superpantry,” which unfolds like a Swiss army knife to reveal layers of shelving.

2. “Door Smack Syndrome”– Have you ever been in a kitchen where you’ve been working at the counter, only to get banged by someone trying to get into the pantry or coming in from an outside door? Consternations such as planning a dishwasher beside a corner sink, or placing the range right in a narrow walk throughway, can be corrected by allowing at least 3 feet of elbow room on either side of each primary work area, and putting key appliances in protected areas.

3. “Embellishment Mania” — Corbels, columns, and decorative molding make a kitchen distinctive . . . unless you’ve overdone it. “I was in a kitchen recently that literally had fluted columns between every cabinet,” says award-winning Decora kitchen designer Neal Luck, owner of NHL Kitchen Designs in Long Beach, Calif. “Not only was it gaudy to look at, but they wasted a staggering amount of space.”

“Columns and corbels should only be used at the end of a run of cabinets, or to offset a major design piece, like an island or a farmhouse sink,” he says. “The same principle should be applied to molding. It can run around the top of the cabinets, or offset an important design feature.”

4. “Habitual Code Breaking” — A surprising number of people plan kitchens with dangerous building code violations that can be very costly to fix. Common mistakes include poor or nonexistent venting above the cooktop, building cabinets less than 12 inches from the cooktop, using non-tempered glass in cabinets that require them and putting too many appliances on one circuit.

5. “Cabinet-Induced Claustrophobia” — “It never fails to surprise me when I walk into an open kitchen, and a client has put upper cabinets over the top of an open counter,” says award-winning Decora cabinets designer, Tracy Foslein of Home Valu Interiors in Bloomington, Minn. “People are spending thousands of dollars to knock down the walls between their kitchens and dining areas, and they’ve just hemmed themselves in.”

“If you really need the storage space, it’s better to use Decora’s ACCESSories line to get more storage space out of your lower cabinets. Over the years, you won’t enjoy peeking underneath the cabinets all the time to talk to your family,” she adds.

6. “Wood Matching Disorder” — Few things make customers crazier than trying to pick a wood for their cabinets, especially when they are trying to make an exact match with the furniture or the flooring.

“In a million years, you’ll never get an exact match, and you wouldn’t want to,” says Luck. “Having that much of an exact wood shade can be very tiring on the eyes. Instead, plan your kitchen cabinets to be two to three shades lighter or darker than the wood tone you’re trying to match. It will coordinate, without being too ‘matchy-matchy.’ ”

7. “Investment Dysfunction” — Is your kitchen really ugly, or just not working for you, yet you refuse to admit it? “I see clients come in all the time who just hate their cabinets, and have a poor kitchen layout, yet they think they can fix all that by getting a new granite countertop,” Foslein says. “Or even worse, they’ve already ripped out the cabinets and only want to spend half what it would take to do the job properly. When you’re planning your kitchen, remember, it pays to get a good, well-made cabinet. They’re the one thing you can’t remove, and you can’t fix so easily later.”