4 Common Mistakes Made During Kitchen Remodeling Projects

Remodeling your kitchen is a great way to improve your home. It can immediately raise your home's resale value, make cooking more enjoyable and more efficient, and you'll be able to enjoy your new kitchen for decades. However, kitchen remodels can go wrong, and when you're remodeling such an important part of your home, you need the project to go as well as possible.

Many homeowners make similar mistakes when they're remodeling a kitchen, most of which can be easily avoided. The best way to avoid these common pitfalls is to plan your remodeling project carefully, and working with a great contractor won't hurt either.

Here are the 4 most common mistakes made during a kitchen remodel, and how to avoid them:

1. Designing a Bad Layout

When you're planning the layout of your new kitchen, there are three parts of your kitchen that you need to consider first:

• Your refrigerator
• Your stove
• Your sink

These three elements should be all be easy to access, and you should keep them near one another. They're the most frequently used parts of your kitchen, and they're extremely important when you're preparing any kind of meal. During the design stages of your kitchen remodeling project, a lack of easy access to these parts of the kitchen might not seem like anything more than a minor inconvenience, but when you're working in the kitchen regularly, you'll feel very differently.

Make sure that you don't have narrow aisles, islands that block access to these parts of the kitchen, or anything that would block a door swing for one of these elements. Also make sure there is easy access to and from your refrigerator, sink, and oven.

2. Not Giving Yourself Enough Storage Space

Many homeowners remodeling their kitchens will focus their attention—and their money—on the most visually appealing aspects of the design, like flooring, counters, and appliances. Of course, those things are very important, but a great kitchen design will also take into account the things that you can't see.

Having enough counter space is one of the most important parts of a kitchen's design, but if that counter space will need to house some of your appliances that could otherwise be stored away, it will be wasted.

Take an inventory of smaller appliances, pots and pans, and other kitchen items, and make sure that your new kitchen design leaves you plenty of space for these things. Talk to your remodeling contractor about some creative storage ideas, and try to blend function with aesthetics while you're designing the storage spaces.

3. Making Your Kitchen Too Trendy

You want your kitchen to be attractive—that's one of the foremost reasons that homeowners have their kitchens remodeled. But designing a kitchen that's too focused on the current trends in design can be a detrimental move.

Most design trends are very timely and often short-lived. Even if the trends stay up-to-date for five years, remodeling your kitchen twice in a decade is probably not reasonable. So while it's not a bad idea to make your kitchen look great, you should focus mainly on making sure that it's functional.

4. Not Carefully Planning Your Budget

The cost of most kitchen remodeling projects is fairly high, so a carefully planned budget is extremely important. There are a couple of factors you'll want to consider here:

How Soon You Plan to Sell Your Home

If you're remodeling your kitchen with the main goal of recuperating the costs after a sale of your home, don't let the cost of the project exceed 20% of your home's value. A newly remodeled kitchen can definitely help you sell your home more quickly, but whether or not you get a great return-on-investment can depend on many factors, like your local economy, so be very cautious of expensive renovations if this is your goal.

Unexpected Expenses

It's much more likely that you'll end up exceeding your original budget rather than coming in under budget. That's unfortunately true for almost all home design projects, and it's important to keep in mind. It's recommended that a portion of your budget is set aside for any unexpected expenses, which will almost certainly crop up.