How much does a kitchen remodel cost in the Sacramento area?

It is not unusual for a kitchen in Sacramento, El Dorado and South Placer counties to be in excess of $100,000. That does not mean we would not do a kitchen at or even under $100,000. The reality is that most of our clients have reasonably sized kitchens, they want decent materials, they want products that will last and carry robust warranties, and they want a company that will stand behind the installation. A company that is one year old does not necessarily have the track record people want when they are spending this much money — first, that the job was priced correctly, and second, that the company will be in business long enough to handle warranty issues if and when they arise.

What moves the number is the scope, and the scope is worth understanding in detail before anyone signs anything.

The two largest drivers are cabinetry and flooring

The quantity of cabinets in the space is relevant. As the linear feet of cabinetry gets shorter, the physical cost of those items goes down, and vice versa. But generally the two largest drivers in a kitchen remodel are cabinetry and flooring. Some people will disagree with me on flooring.

Most kitchen remodels include a hefty scope of work as it relates to flooring. Kitchens usually flow into adjacent rooms and don't typically have transitions to different materials. People generally want the material that is in their kitchen to flow into those adjacent rooms, so more often than not we are redoing flooring not just in the kitchen but throughout most of the house, or at least the common areas that connect to the kitchen.

What drives the cost of cabinetry

Every cabinet is essentially a wood box with something on the face of it and something inside of it. If the face material — your doors and drawer fronts — is MDF and painted, that is generally much less expensive than a product like oak or maple. The profile of the door is also a driver.

Most people don't realize that even high-end custom cabinetry shops are likely still purchasing their doors and drawer fronts from a door and drawer front manufacturer, and many times the same is true of the drawer boxes themselves. Just because somebody says they are a custom shop does not mean they are making every component of the cabinet — the door front, the drawer front and especially the hardware.

Hardware

Soft-close hinges and drawer glides are common on pretty much every cabinet built in the past few years, but not all hardware is created equal. There are overseas brands that are inferior to the primary brands used in most high-end cabinetry today. Among the better known are Hettich and Blum. There are plenty of knockoffs that not only won't perform the same in the short term but come with little or no warranty, where most of the higher-end manufacturers carry a lifetime warranty.

The box and the drawer box

The most significant cost in building a cabinet is pretty much everything you see on the front, and the runner-up is the drawer boxes themselves. The cabinet box is generally made from plywood and may have some sort of veneer on it. Most mid to high level shops offer a three-quarter-inch plywood box, usually with a veneer panel, especially on the interiors, because the interiors don't get painted or stained but they are the functional portion of the cabinet. They need basic resistance to moisture so the cabinets can be wiped out and so dishes carrying residual moisture from the dishwasher can be tolerated. An unfinished wood panel is much more susceptible to damage from everyday use.

The drawer box can be made a multitude of ways. The most common is edge-banded plywood or furniture board. When you cut plywood it creates an unfinished edge, so edge banding — effectively a laminated piece of the same material that is on the rest of the panel — is applied to make it appear finished. There is nothing wrong with this, but it is generally the least expensive way to build a drawer box.

Joinery also plays a role. A drawer box put together with butt joints and nails, or butt joints with glue and nails, is much less expensive than more robust methods like rabbeted edges, mortise and tenon, or dovetail, which has been a tried and true method of long-term drawer box construction for decades.

Then there is the material of the drawer box itself. Some manufacturers and custom shops will use plywood and still edge band it, but dovetail it. You can see how the combination of these details gets tricky for a homeowner to work through. A cabinet salesperson may tell you they have dovetailed drawer boxes — but are they plywood, or are they solid maple? There is a big difference in the material used and likely in the cost. For somebody to simply say the boxes are dovetail does not make them better or worse; it defines one small piece of how the drawer box is built. Knowing what matters to you may be the deciding factor. Either way, it is important to understand how your cabinet is going to be built, including all of these details.

Drawers cost more than doors

Take a two-foot-wide cabinet with a single door and nothing inside but an adjustable shelf. Now put the exact same 24-inch box next to it with three drawers. On the surface it looks like two extra panels — one door became three drawer fronts. But there are also three drawer boxes behind those three faces. The realistic increase in total wood material between those two cabinets is roughly 60 to 80 percent, nearly double the material for the same overall dimensions.

There is physical material plus labor and tool cost. Tool cost means saws, drill bits and everything else woodworkers need; those expendables wear out and that has to be accounted for. Cutting a piece of MDF versus a piece of oak makes a difference — the harder the wood, the larger the toll on the saw blade or drill bit, and the cost goes up. When a saw blade isn't sharp, the material slows down in the machine and you see burn marks where the blade heated and burned the end of the material. To avoid that, these guys have to keep their tools literally very sharp.

Finishing

Certain stain colors are difficult to achieve. Some stains require excessive toning, which is additional steps in the painting or staining process that allow the material to blend across an entire room. A shop often cannot get every piece of wood for a kitchen from the same tree, so there will be variation in wood color, and toning is how a finisher brings consistency to the stain across the room. That is a skill in itself, and most people never see that part of the process.

Glass doors and organizers

There are plenty of other details that drive cabinetry cost — glass doors, and internal organization units like knife blocks, trash pullouts and spice pullouts. The sky is the limit on organizational devices. Some are genuinely useful and some, in our opinion, are not the best use of the space or of your budget dollars. That is why we try to find out what our clients really struggle with in their current layout, and help them choose only the organizers that will help their day-to-day efficiency. Pullouts are like drawers in that they add up quickly, but there are places — tall pantry cabinets in particular — where a pullout is essential to using the full depth of the cabinet without reaching over everything in front just to see what is behind it.

Beyond cabinetry, the cost follows the scope

Cabinetry and flooring are the two things we see across almost every kitchen, but the cost overall is tied to the physical scope of the entire project. Is this a like-for-like kitchen, where the layout stays intact or goes back in its current configuration? Or are we removing walls and making significant changes to systems — plumbing, electrical, mechanical, heating and air?

Electrical capacity

Pretty much every kitchen project we are part of in a home built more than 15 years or so ago is likely to have inadequate electrical circuitry run to the kitchen. We may need to bring additional circuits from the panel to meet today's electrical standards, and as people update, upgrade or add appliances, that becomes a cost driver. Sometimes there are ways to circumvent bringing in new circuitry, but your contractor has to genuinely understand what he is looking at.

Removing walls

If walls need to come out, that can significantly increase cost. Most contractors are not also licensed structural engineers, so structural engineering may be necessary to move any load-bearing partition. Contractors without significant history doing these projects can badly misdiagnose what needs to be done to get you what you are after, and you will see that arrive as change orders in the middle of construction.

The lowest number is not always the accurate one

People get excited by the number presented to them at the beginning and are quick to sign a contract, but the person who handed them a bigger number may have been closer to accurate. There is nothing worse than getting into the middle of your project and realizing you have to sacrifice something to get back to your budget because the contractor didn't bid the job correctly, or didn't go through a formal pre-construction process to find and solve the problems before contracts were drafted and construction started.

Finding a contractor with real experience in this work is how you understand the cost upfront. We have more than 20 years of experience in kitchen remodeling and custom home building across the greater Sacramento area, including surrounding counties like El Dorado, Placer and Yolo, and into Napa and Sonoma. We have worked in just about every jurisdiction from Lake Tahoe to the Bay Area.

The bottom line: choose a contractor who will take you through a formal pre-construction process, explain these details with you, and put them in the written scope of work and on the plans, so there is no guessing later about what was in the proposal.