They say home is where the heart is!

SURELY!

But you cannot have your heart in a place that does not give you convenience and comfort. However, not every home comes equipped with amenities that an individual might want.

Remodeling- the raging trend!

Having them installed on your own constitutes remodeling your house. While the trend of improving your home, rather than changing it has been raging for quite some time, it has especially begun to pick since 2015.

People that renovate belong to three distinct categories: first-time homebuyers, repeat homebuyers, and long-term owners.

Of course, then when it comes to experience, first-time home buyers have minimal renovation experience as compared to repeat home buyers and long-term owners.

Renovating Your Kitchen: the Why’s

Given that such a massive proportion of renovators are first-time buyers, they may not always make the best decisions for their renovations.

The following chart shows that renovators (83%) perceive that the highest Return on Investment comes from kitchen renovations. Increasing the resale value is the purpose of about 67% of total repairs taking place.

In addition to just that, kitchens are one of the spaces where most time may be spent. While people in India and Ukraine may spend more than 13 hours in their kitchen in an average week, there is a difference between the time men and women spend in kitchens and the purpose for that time spent.

Remodeling Your Kitchen: of Budgets and Cost Savings

But while renovating your kitchen may seem like a great idea right now, things change when you have to set a budget for it. To ensure you have a reasonable budget to work with, you should focus on industry trends.

Industry trends dictate that spending about 5% to 15% of your home value on kitchen remodeling is reasonable.

However, the above bar chart shows how often the budgets are exceeded when it comes to actual renovations. As the budget rises, the probability of it being exceeded does too. So, be it new wood-burning stoves or new cabinets, we have remodeling hacks that will help you stay within your budget. Here they are:

1. Ready to Assemble Cabinets: Save Effort and Cost

Whenever kitchen remodeling is in question, the highest cost is always the cost of cabinets. The cost is so substantial that the kitchen cabinet industry is exploding! The global cabinet market is expected to grow at 5%, which is one of the highest growth rates among industries around the world.

While you may be tempted to have custom cabinets made to suit your kitchen design, this will impose a considerable cost on your pocket. The chances are that you can always find designs that suit your kitchen. So we suggest you to go for them. The readymade designs are already assembled and give you the actual look and feel, making it easier for you to make an informed decision.

The costs for such cabinets may often be as low as half of the cost of getting custom-made cabinets!

2. Track Lighting over Recessed Lighting vs. Natural Lights

You might have every amenity in your kitchen, but if your kitchen is not lit well enough, it will not be presentable. With that said, it is worthwhile exploring the lighting options that you might have in your kitchen.

Most often than not, kitchen remodeling tends to favor recessed lighting. These are small lights placed under your cabinets and in your ceiling. They involve plenty of work with extra wiring, hole cutting, and fixing costs.

 These can often be unnecessary, given that you will not even be using all of these lights, and it is a hassle to remember all the corresponding buttons anyway.

The right alternative is track lights. Track lights consist of a metallic track mounted on the ceiling that consists of light fixtures. These lights are not only cost sufficient to install but also cost-effective to use.

They use lesser energy than the standard recessed lighting. When complemented with LED bulbs though, it may use 80% lesser energy!

But what if we were to increase this efficiency even further? What if we were to say that it was better that you take out a window to enjoy natural light, rather than depending totally on artificial light.

Natural light has several health benefits for you regardless of the cost that you will save every day, not depending on artificial light.

3. Splitting Up Countertops

Countertops are what make your kitchen a kitchen. But having a great countertop is also about spending substantial amounts. Granite has always been a popular choice when it comes to countertops. According to treehugger, about 64% of new homes have granite countertops!

Since granite is durable and presentable and has to handle several alterations, we recommend that you stick with granite. However, we do have a useful hack to cut your cost on countertops.

Why not split your countertops into granite and butcher block. Choose complementary colors and textures and use them in your kitchen. Have granite at the more important spaces and make the other spaces and island with butcher block.

If you want to cut down on the granite costs, you can choose to go with laminate, one of the most cost-effective solutions for kitchen renovations. It looks exactly like stone but is only about 25% of the cost. So this will give a perfect look within your budget.

Final Word

Your kitchen remodeling is not actually about how much you spend, contrary to what most people might think. It is about how convenient you can make things for yourself and what value-additions you can bring to your food.

With that said, it is essential to recognize that you can achieve all this at lower costs. This will not only save your costs in the short term but increase your Return on Investment on the house as the kitchen remodeling increases the value of your house.