simpsongal That's something to keep in mind re: custom if it's a smaller space. I am sure I will need all the help I can get if/when we decide to move forward on this. And probably even before that with just understanding how to best research our options.
Wow! I suppose if it was a complete tear down, $20k isn't that bad. The quote we got this AM for the patio was $7500. Which is a lot, and so that's what started this "would you rather" conversation with MH. We've thought about the deck over from HD, but we like the look of the natural wood, which is why we've stuck to stain this long. MH is reasonable handy though, so maybe we could do the partial Trex ourselves...that's something else to research.
Ours was PARTIAL composite. Meaning that the deck boards and hand rails were composite but the support and frame was wood. We did have to stain the wood parts which we did this year and I think that was almost 2k. (we hired for that). Had we done full composite the cost would have been about double. That wasn't in the budget so we did the partial composite/partial wood. I think the deck builder called it hybrid.
We have added the idea of a partial composite to the idea pile as well. MH looked into it briefly and priced out the materials, which would be around $2500 for the size of our deck. It's an option to add to the list for sure.
I feel like as a buyer I'd rather an updated kitchen with a deck project.
But if you aren't actually thinking about moving in the next 5 years I'd do whatever you would use more. For my husband it's the kitchen, I'd like a patio. ,
Post by dr.girlfriend on Jul 16, 2017 12:54:39 GMT -5
We have a similar house (1400 square feet, 2 bedrooms 1.5 baths) with a small kitchen also (9' x 11') and I will say, we did knock down the wall between the kitchen and dining room and renovated the kitchen it made a HUGE difference. I would seriously consider that. Every single day, I walk into my kitchen and am like, "I love my kitchen now." We were able to do it for around $20k. I know you don't want to lose the cabinets on that wall, but you could always keep overhead ones and just make a pass-through. We did cabinets on the dining room side instead of a breakfast bar, as well as a big deep pantry pull-out next to the fridge and a shallow cabinet to the side of the fridge, and it ended up holding all our stuff and more, despite the fact that we only have one real upper cabinet now. I have a big kitchen reno thread here and many more posts on H&G, so feel free to ask any questions.
Having just done a kitchen, that's the one I would pick. It makes every day easier. But I would also tear down the wall while you're at it. We did and it surprisingly didn't add much money to the project (it's really just demo and they were going to be changing the floors anyway).
Re: the wall. It's the wall that we have our cabinets on, so if we lose them, we'd lose a lot of storage. I know we can just add ones to the back of what would probably become an island, but I wonder if it would be odd to not have much wall storage. We would have to speak to a designer to see what we could do. I'll just add it to the estimate for how much it would all cost
Check out my kitchen thread I posted above. I did the exact thing and looooove it. Pictures don't really do justice to how much more open and big it feels. Save
In reality, we just redid our backyard last year. However, our reasons for doing that over the kitchen were that the backyard was largely unusable space (big hill -- which we've now pushed back and terraced for additional space) and the kitchen is mostly updated, just not what I'd choose. The kitchen I'd want would have also been much higher cost. So backyard it is. But DH knows I'm itching to at least do something about the cabinets.
Re: the wall. It's the wall that we have our cabinets on, so if we lose them, we'd lose a lot of storage. I know we can just add ones to the back of what would probably become an island, but I wonder if it would be odd to not have much wall storage. We would have to speak to a designer to see what we could do. I'll just add it to the estimate for how much it would all cost
Check out my kitchen thread I posted above. I did the exact thing and looooove it. Pictures don't really do justice to how much more open and big it feels. Save
I remember your transformation - it looks great and you were really MM about it. That gives me hope!
Check out my kitchen thread I posted above. I did the exact thing and looooove it. Pictures don't really do justice to how much more open and big it feels. Save
I remember your transformation - it looks great and you were really MM about it. That gives me hope!
For awhile we thought about having upper cabinets above a pass-through like in this picture on the top right...you could do that if you're worried about losing the uppers. I'm glad we didn't, but it might work for you, especially if your ceilings are higher than ours.