The Rooms You Should & Should Not Renovate First In A Home Remodel

The Room You Should Renovate First In A Home Remodel

Not every home is the same, therefore not every home has the same needs. The room you should renovate first is determined solely by you. But there is a way for you to discover what room needs to go first and that starts with doing nothing.

Live in your home for a while before grabbing the hammer. Design shortfalls and annoyances tend to expose themselves as you live in the midst of them. The lack of natural light in your living room may not be evident until you experience it day in and day out. The layout of your bathroom may prove to be troublesome as you observe your kids climbing over each other to get ready for school. That level of clarity only comes after you live in your home for a bit and familiarize yourself with it.

If there isn’t one specific room that requires your attention first, then I recommend starting with a relatively quick project. Start with a powder room makeover or a bedroom refresh to feel a sense of accomplishment right off the bat! The thing about long arduous gut renovations is that if you’re not mentally prepared for them, you’ll find yourself drained before you’ve even begun and your motivation to continue in the rest of the house might just disappear.

When You Need A Confidence Boost, Refresh Your Powder Bath

The Room You Should Not Renovate First…And Why

The one area of the home I tend to not recommend starting with is the kitchen – especially if this is your first ever home renovation. And there are a few reasons for that… 

EXPERIENCE

Kitchens are perhaps the most complicated, detail oriented, most easily screw up-able design challenge you can take on. There are so many little details that are often forgotten during the planning stage and if it’s your first time taking on a project of this magnitude, I highly recommend starting in another room of the house. Dip your toe into renovations elsewhere and get comfortable with the planning process. Consider the smaller rooms of your home as practice runs for the bigger projects. Tackling less demanding projects first will (hopefully) give you the experience, confidence, and clarity you need for the kitchen.

STYLE & NEEDS

The thing about kitchens is that the design choices you make are primarily permanent. Sure, you can always repaint down the road, but the layout of the kitchen, the style of the cabinets, the tile backsplash, the plumbing fixtures, and the lighting placement is all relatively permanent…or at least very expensive to change. It’s risky to let your kitchen be the trial run when it involves such important and expensive decisions. Your experience, needs, and style preferences can change drastically after the first year in your home and it’s because of this that you need to first become very comfortable and confident in your design style and your kitchen’s needs.

In our Nebraska kitchen remodel, we lived in our home for a year before we remodeled the kitchen and in that year, we discovered exactly what our kitchen’s shortfalls were. The layout of the kitchen wasn’t working for us and storage was lacking. We put a lot of thought and time into solving that problem.

However, what I didn’t do was give myself proper time to discover our home’s architectural style and how my personal style would fit into that. Despite waiting a year before remodeling our kitchen, it was still the first project we took on and my style certainly evolved as we continued our renovations room by room. You could visibly see the evolution of my style as you walked through the home and I wish I would have given that more thought.

Before starting a kitchen renovation, know the ins and outs of your current kitchen. Dissect what’s working and what’s not so you can create a list of needs. Once you know that, give yourself proper time to become confident in your style in connection with the architecture of your home and be comfortable making decisions that you know you will love years down the road.

BUDGET

It’s one thing to know your style, it’s another to have the budget to finance it. There’s always a time and place for compromise, but if you don’t have an adequate budget to execute your vision, you’ll find yourself making “good enough” purchases that you may not love a year down the road. Wait until you have a sufficient budget so you can purchase things that you want in the long run…not just in the short run.

SOMETHING TO NOTE: While these are my recommendations, they are not a matter of fact. If you feel confident in your style and comfortable making design decisions, by all means tackle a kitchen remodel early on in your renovation journey!