Can a kitchen remodel be completed in three weeks?
That was the challenge Kacey Fitzpatrick of Avalon Enterprises, Los Altos, accepted — after the client sweetened the deal with a 10 percent bonus.
Fitzpatrick had already worked with the couple on updating the Palo Alto Victorian, adding a basement in 1996 and redoing a bathroom in late 2010.
This time the couple wanted to solve the most annoying kitchen problems: drawers that wouldn’t open all the way, inadequate storage and a broken oven. They agreed to keep the wood floors, which would have tacked on up to 10 days to refinish or replace. And they mostly kept the layout, moving only the oven.
The owners also wanted to warm up the décor, trading the white-on-white for bamboo cabinets and some color.
In order to meet the deadline, Fitzpatrick spent a couple of months on the design end and another six weeks or so to order the cabinets and appliances. Almost everything needed to be on site before construction began. Subcontractors were scheduled in minute detail.
Of course, even the most methodical of plans can go awry.
“The main delay was the cabinets were delivered almost a week late because their driver got sick and they didn’t have a replacement driver,” Fitzpatrick said.
And, because it was an older home, deconstruction surprises should have come as no real surprise. “Once we removed the existing cabinets we found large areas of missing drywall,” she said, noting it added an extra day for patching.
Countertops took two extra days to be fabricated and installed, she said, and the owner decided to paint an adjacent room, which added a day.
“Luckily with all these little surprises, we were still able to juggle the work that had to be done, and put in a little extra time here and there, such that we met the schedule,” she said.
Time-savers included choosing CaesarStone for both the countertop and backsplash, thus eliminating tile work, and keeping lighting fixtures and most appliances in their same locations to minimize rough-ins and plumbing and electrical work.
They did decide to move the oven and exhaust hood to the opposite side of the kitchen and added LED under-cabinet lighting.
Given that the couple wanted “green building” in their new kitchen, the fast timeline actually helped: Not changing the floors was a form of “reuse.”
Other green details included donating their old cabinets to The ReUse People, using LED lighting under the cabinets, choosing zero-VOC (volatile-organic-compound) paints and cabinets, opting for EnergyStar appliances and building a compost bin into the countertop.
Near the end of construction, that compost bin was the only thing left on the punchlist.
Resources:
Building contractor: Kacey Fitzpatrick, Avalon Enterprises Inc., Los Altos, 650-906-7029
Deconstruction: The ReUse People, Oakland, 510-383-1983
Goal of project:
Complete a kitchen remodel in three weeks
Unanticipated issues:
Cabinets arrived four days late; missing drywall behind cabinets
Year house built:
Victorian
Size of home, lot:
2,162 sq ft (includes basement) + 400 sq-ft-loft on a 5,624-sq-ft lot
Time to complete:
Two months to design; about six weeks to order cabinets, appliances; three weeks of construction