You asked, and we calculated. Today we are breaking down my sister’s budget kitchen remodel total cost, which we did in partnership with Lowe’s. I’ve written a few posts about the process (and obviously make sure you see the reveal here), so I might repeat some things for those just landing. Today I’ll break down what we spent from when we started the project. What is hard to calculate is our time and what it would be “worth” if we charged for it (for these makeovers we get paid from the partner to create the content, not from my sister). Here goes!

My sister and brother-in-law were already deep into their remodel before we began this project and partnership. So a lot of the work was already completed, making this budget breakdown kinda impossible to really add up accurately if you were starting from scratch. They had already finished the framing, rough electrical and plumbing, window openings, and drywall. Starting at this point was pretty awesome for us because they had laid it out really well and had already “placed” everything, so our job was to shop at Lowe’s for everything you actually see and design within these parameters. We didn’t reconfigure anything or even move an outlet (intentionally). Lowe’s covered materials and the flooring, cabinet, and countertop installation by Lowe’s vendors. We covered any outside labor. It was the most streamlined kitchen I’ve ever done because of their services. Let’s get into the numbers.

Kitchen Consultation And In-Person Measurement – $75

We met with Chris at Lowe’s to design and lay out the kitchen cabinets. To kick off the project and confirm the order is correct, Lowe’s sends someone out to measure your kitchen, ensuring everything will fit just right. This costs $75. This is to cover their time to design it all in case you move on to a different cabinet company.

Hardwood Flooring And Installation – $2,243.62

Bruce Hardwood Floors in ‘Fawn Oak’

We chose this wood floor (which we LOVED) for $4.79/sq ft or $105.38/carton. Michelle’s kitchen was 219 sq. ft., so the materials added up to $1,342.81. The flooring was installed in one day by one fantastic installer. The labor costs totaled $900.81. Lowe’s managed the vendor and set up the appointments (it was super streamlined). Now, full disclosure, the install rate will be different everywhere because from what I can tell, they are installed by an outside vendor that Lowe’s works closely with,. So depending on where you live, your Lowe’s would have different contracts with different vendors, so price could vary. As a reminder, we were so impressed with this wood. I was a hardwood snob before and couldn’t believe that something this affordable could look so good and classic.

Upper And Lower Cabinets – $20,332.92

Upper Cabinets: ‘Tropic’ | Lower Cabinets: ‘Emma’

The cabinetry was and will always be the biggest expense (which is why we always encourage trying to paint or refinish what you have if you can). We fully broke down the cabinets in their own post last week, but the quick and dirty is that we chose two different lines (slightly different price points) for uppers and lowers. And we saved money by using a huge vintage pantry and installing shelving instead of uppers for part of the kitchen. If you are shopping at Lowe’s, here’s a cheat sheet on the cost of the cabinetry from least expensive to most expensive:

Diamond Express | Allen & Roth | Shenandoah | Diamond Express Plus | Diamond Intermediate | Kraftmaid-Diamond Advanced | Schuler

Cabinets with 30% discount: $16,294.96
Cabinet Install Labor: $4,037.96

Appliances – $6,380.88

Electric Range | Brass Knobs | Refrigerator | Brass Handles

The appliances were fantastic and so pretty (they drove the whole color palette). They definitely aren’t the cheapest line, so this could be somewhere you could save money, but they are also just so prominent (especially in a smaller kitchen), so having them all be as streamlined as possible will keep it from looking too cheap. Here they are broken down:

Fridge: $2,463.12 + $359.10 for brass handles
Electric Range: $1,601.11 + $337.46 for brass handles
Rangehood Insert: $209.98
Dishwasher: $1,221.06 + $189.05 for the brass handle

Taj Mahal Real Stone Countertops – $10,915.80

Countertops

This was one of the places where we splurged. Lowe’s doesn’t break down the cost between materials and installation. In my experience, it’s specific to the stone because if it gets cracked or broken during fabrication, they have to replace it, so I would imagine the install cost increases with real stone that is slightly more expensive with Lowe’s, too. We estimated what it would have cost if we used Organic white Caesarstone (which is one of my favorites for engineered stone), and with the current promotion it would be around $6k. So that is a substantial savings of almost $5k from what ours cost. Lowe’s most popular option (if you are curious) is Golden Sky(D Grade), which is a faux veined engineered stone; the price with the current promotion would be around $9,662.70.

Plumbing Fixtures – $2,261.07

Hot Water Faucet | Faucet | Sink | Pot Filler

This is one place you could have absolutely saved. Michelle had already plumbed for two things that are a nice-to-have, but not a need-to-have: the pot filler and hot water faucet (they also plumbed and planned for a pebble ice machine, which we capped and nixed). So as you can see below, that could have saved a lot. Garen already had the disposal, so that’s not included here.

Farmhouse Sink: $275.08 (This is a GREAT place to save. It looks as expensive as fancy ones!)
Sink Faucet: $258.99 (we chose this faucet because we had to choose one that had a full suite that we liked, but it’s great on its own)
Hot Water Faucet and Tank: $549 + $389. Uh oh. Ok so annoyingly, our brass faucet didn’t come with a hot water tank, so we had to buy another one separately just for the tank. We didn’t know this up front, obviously. It did come with a silver faucet, so if your main faucet was nickel, this is a much more affordable choice.
Pot Filler: $789

So nixing the hot water and pot filler would have saved us over $1,700!

Hardware – $326.46

I can’t do cheap hardware. In fact, I would prefer painted wood knobs over cheap metal ones. We touched on this in the cabinet deep dive last week, where you saw all the options we were considering. We spent $326.46 on knobs and pulls for all the cabinets. Knobs were about $8 each, and our long and short pulls were $19 and $14, respectively. These were on the more expensive side, for sure, but absolutely worth the extra couple hundred dollars, I promise.

Pendant Lighting – $167.99

This was a fantastic place to save money. Sure, there are cheaper fixtures out there, but this one looked higher-end than that price and yet wasn’t splurgy at all. Michelle and Garen had already installed recessed lighting before we started the kitchen design, so if this number seems low, it’s because it is. This $167.99 covers the one pendant light above the kitchen sink. The rest were recessed lights already installed.

Finish Carpentry And Materials – $3,649.16

My brother hired a finish carpenter to do all the beadboard panels, hood box, shelving, and brackets.
10 beadboard panels: $267.60.
18 wooden brackets we needed for the shelving and to support the peninsula overhang: $327.96.
Wood and decorative trim it took to build out the shelves: $453.60.
The finish carpenter charged $2,600 to install all the panels, build the hood cover and shelving, and secure it all to the wall.

Painting – $1,850

We hired a team of painters to come in and spray the room and paint my sister’s large vintage cabinet. Painters did the job for $1,500, and we estimated that we spent about $350 on paint and supplies. Now this is a place where we could have saved by DIY. The reason this was even this low is because we specifically didn’t change finishes or paint colors, which requires so much more time/labor. So the walls, brackets, shelves, and trim were all the same paint color and finish, while the window, door, and vintage cabinet were white to add some variation. But if we had chosen to do the brackets and shelves in a different color than the walls, it would have taken twice the time, and thus cost twice as much (we used the Forte line from Sherwin-Williams in satin finish – this is a self-priming, self-leveling paint that is super durable).

Props And Decor For Styling $TBD

Of course we styled it out, but a lot of those things were things that I had in my inventory or were vintage (some she kept, many she didn’t). So this cost is for the remodel cost, not the styling and decor.

Additional DIY Done By Garen ($0)

Garen is handy when he’s not busy running his window company, so he installed the appliances, and he and Ken did some of the finished plumbing. So yes, he’s a window expert (he owns a company where they keep the vintage frames and double-pane the windows on site, which is so cool), so he installed the new big window.

Grand Total: $48,202.90

But What If You “Hired” A Designer?

Now trying to calculate my time, Gretchen’s time, and my brother’s time is kinda hard. As you know, designers and contractors are expensive to hire, as they should be. I think I spent probably 50+ design hours on this (not including the photo shoots, content creation, or negotiation of the contract, which most designers don’t need to do). Gretchen probably did more, let’s say 60, since she did all of our Spoak renders and did more of the ordering and project management. I’m not sure of the going rate for designers, so let’s say for me its 200$/hour (I have no idea if that’s accurate) and $100 for an associate designer/project manager. So maybe I would have been $10k and Gretchen $6,000 (adding another $16k to the projected cost). And then my brother, a contractor with Afore Construction, spent around 10-15 hours on the job, but didn’t charge us (I tried to pay him, but he’s a real caretaker of a brother and was like, “nah, it’s for my sisters,” which is very sweet).

I would imagine all the construction prior to arriving would be 20k+ (they were doing the whole house so hard to parcel out just for the kitchen).

So yeah…. Kitchen remodels are expensive, and they seem to be going up, not down. Here are the ways you can save:

1. If you are starting from a white drywall box like this, you can skip hiring a contractor or designer by using a company like Lowe’s to streamline all the contracting work and use them for installation services. Feel free to copy the design of this kitchen and design it yourself!
2. Go for engineered stone or butcher block. I love real stone, but getting a simple white Caesarstone as we had intended would have saved $5k.
3. We skipped tile. I don’t love just a couple rows of tile backsplash (especially when integrated with shelving – just so many lines) and prefer tiling the full wall, which would have been super expensive in both material and especially labor. We had planned to do just a short stone backsplash instead, installed by the fabrication team. But we had to pivot once installed because the thickness of the counters was so high that adding it as a backsplash would have only been 2″ due to the placement of the outlets (or we could have gone around the outlets and gone up higher, but I don’t love that look when the stone is 3cm and so thick). Skipping tile saved thousands, mostly in install time.
4. Using full overlay cabinet fronts (instead of inset).
5. Affordable pre-finished wood flooring instead of tile or stain-in-place flooring. This install took one day and was a little over $2k total. I was so impressed (and yes, wood flooring is great in a kitchen and a bathroom).
6. Beadboard paneling and shelves instead of upper cabinets.
7. Paint yourselves. This is best with experience or watching a ton of videos, and you won’t do as good a job, but unlike plumbing and electrical, this is something you could attempt yourself (just do your research around types of paint).
8. More affordable appliances. This is hard for me because in a small kitchen cheap appliances can get just so much attention, so just go for the simplest lines and least amount of contrast or bells and whistles. But I can’t really recommend cheap appliances because they need to function well for a long time.
9. Skip the hot water tap, the pot filler, and any pebble ice machine. Heck, if you want to simplify it more, get a fridge without plumbing for ice/water so you don’t have to bring plumbing over to it. My sister already rough-plumbed for all of these, so we executed the original plumbing design.

I hope this is so helpful. I’ve done 10+ kitchens now, so I have more experience than a lot of people, but I’m sure other more experienced designers (kitchen-specific designers) can weigh in and give even more ways to save. My #1 tip if you just want a “better” kitchen but not necessarily a “designer” is to paint your original dated cabinets. Here are a few kitchen-specific posts that can help!

Reveals:

• RENO COACH PROJECT REVEAL: See How This Family DIY’d IKEA Cabinets And Made A Beautifully Bespoke Kitchen
• Sara’s Galley Kitchen “Update” Turned Into A Full Renovation (And The Result Is Well Worth The Wait)
• Emily Bowser’s Kitchen REVEAL! Plus The 8 Ways She Really Maximized Her Galley Kitchen Storage
• The Prettiest Green And Pink Kitchen Remodel That We Completed In 7 WEEKS
• Rashida’s Totally Transformed Kitchen Reveal (That Includes One Of Our Favorite “New Classic” Kitchen Trends)
• EHD Alum Photographer, Tessa, Shows Us Her FINALLY Updated Kitchen
• Arlyn’s Rental Kitchen Reveal Just Might Have You Wishing You Had Brown—Or Even Cherry— Cabinets (Yes, Really)
• The 3 Best Ways To SAVE $$$ On Your Kitchen Reno (+ Our EHD Alumns’ First Reveal As a New Boutique Team)
• How Well Do IKEA Kitchen Cabinets Actually Hold Up? A Very Honest Review 4 Years Later
• Velinda’s First Freelance Client Reveal: Molding The ‘Builder-Grade Budget’ + Where They Saved & Splurged

Design Tips:

• How We Added Panel-Ready “Hidden” Appliances Without Replacing All The Cabinets
• I Bought A Counter-Depth Fridge & Here’s What I Honestly Think About It 2 Years Later (Hint: Some Pros & A BIG Con)
• Small Kitchen Ideas To Steal (For Renters And Renovators)
• The RIGHT Way To Paint Your Kitchen Cabinets and Save $$$ (Factory Finish Guaranteed)
• The Process of Designing Our Farmhouse Kitchen – Some Questions I Asked Myself And Where I Chose “Style Over Practicality”
• Our Go-To Cabinet Hardware Placement
• Renovating Your Kitchen? Here Are All The Reno Mistakes To Avoid – Crowdsourced From Our Readers Who Have Been There & Done That
• The Truth About Unlacquered Brass Faucets + All The Kitchen Faucets I’m Considering (And WHY….)

*Photos by Kaitlin Green