Real Estate Feast

The South Florida Kitchen Renovation Project–Part One

According to the National Association of Realtors, you can expect to recoup about 80% of a major kitchen renovation when you do a real estate transaction.  By that estimate, I’m going to get back about $30,000 on our current project.  Here’s a summary of a Return on Home Improvement Investments.

When we bought our house about four years ago, we knew that the kitchen needed redoing, but I managed to put it off and put it off, until three weeks ago a pipe in the wall behind the sink gave way and flooded the place.  Time to bite the bullet.  Thus begins a drama.

Here’s the cast of characters:  George the Plumber; Andy the Cabinet Guy; Gerry, Armando and Eddie the Electricians; Juan the Drywall Man; Jose the Gas Piper; Jorge and Juan the Hood Ventilation People, a Counter Top and a Tile Person to be named; Silvano the Mad Italian Painter and of course, Kitchen Designer and Wife Extraordinaire, Kathy. 

In three weeks we’ve ripped out the old cabinets, cleaned up the floor, designed and ordered the new cabinets, repaired the offending pipe, laid in gas piping from the propane tanks, and rewired the kitchen to handle the under-the-counter lighting and the power demands of my new Dacor gas/electric combination range and hood.  Oh, and we moved the refrigerator to the other wall.  The electrical has passed it’s first inspection and everything else is being permitted, of course.  (This being South Florida, an enormous amount of this kind of work is done without permits.  This is a big mistake, because when you go to sell your house, you have to go back and permit all the work anyway.  I don’t understand why folks do this.  Well, I do understand.  I’m paying a premium to have this work permitted because each of these vendors has to go stand in line and deal with the infamously cranky Miami-Dade County Building Department.)

Today’s project is knocking a hole in the gabled wall and running ventilation tubes up from where the hood will be mounted.  It’s amazing how much noise and dust a jackhammer going through concrete makes.  I’d record it and post the noise in the blog, but I haven’t had that lesson yet.

If you’d like any information about South Florida real estate or how to re-do a kitchen now that I’ve learned, you can reach me at 305-401-8058 or bishopric.r@ewm.com.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under Home Renovation, Real Estate News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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