Hello, I’m Ruby Konstantin. Dave K, who usually writes these articles, is my husband. I’ve been working with Dave in our family remodeling company for quite a few years now, so I thought I knew everything about the business-well, except for the things that require the use of power tools!-but I recently learned what remodeling is like from our customers’ perspective. I thought I’d use that experience to pass on a few tips to those of you planning a remodeling project.

You might think that since we are in the remodeling business that we would be doing remodeling at home but I have been waiting 10 years to remodel our kitchen. The ugly yellow countertop, the old vinyl floor that never got sparkly clean anymore, the cabinets with their old-fashioned doors and knobs– all of it just had to go.

The first step in our project was the demolition of the existing kitchen. Everything right down to the walls had to come out. That meant moving the refrigerator into the dining room, the stove onto the patio and everything from all the cabinets to wherever we could find a spot.

Here’s my tip number one: as soon as you know you will be remodeling start cleaning out the rooms you’ll be working on. I didn’t start soon enough so I found myself still pulling pots and pans out of the back of my kitchen cabinets late the night before they were to start.

When I got home from work the next day my kitchen was gone. If you have never lived in a home without a kitchen, let me tell you it’s pretty weird. You don’t realize how often you are in there in the course of a day. Naturally, at dinnertime it meant we just had to go out to eat. Normally, I love that, but after a week or so, it gets old. Plus, the perishable food in the fridge that I would have been using to make dinner-veggies, salad stuff, etc.-ended up in the trash. Tip number two for kitchen remodels: start purging the fridge a week before you start. Face it, you aren’t going to be cooking dinner, so why waste the food.

On my day off, there were workers in the house all day, so I could forget having a relaxing day at home. Here’s another tip: try to plan your days off so that you aren’t home all day when they are working there.

I hope you haven’t gotten the idea that this was all just a hassle. There are fun parts too, like picking out the materials and colors for the project. For me, it was kitchen cabinets, countertops, and flooring. There were so many choices in so many price ranges and each material–Corian, marble, granite–had its pluses and minuses. I love to shop, so I was in heaven.

Here’s a tip on picking out materials-educate yourself about the qualities of the materials you are looking at. It’s not only about the way it looks; you should also consider factors such as your lifestyle when selecting materials. For example, we have a pool and people often come in from the pool through the kitchen, so I needed a floor material that water wouldn’t damage.

In terms of things like the cabinets, think about what worked and didn’t work in your old kitchen, and incorporate solutions in the new layout. For example, we had a spacious pantry cabinet which was great except things on the back of the shelves tended to get forgotten about-in fact when I cleaned that cabinet out I found we had 8 cans of tomato paste back there (I’m not sure but I vaguely remember some recipe those were meant for).

In our new pantry cabinet, which is the same size and location as the old one, we have slide out shelves so everything is easily visible all the time. Yes, it cost a little more for that feature, but the convenience is worth it to me.

I also decided to go with a style that doesn’t require knobs on the cabinet doors since on our old cabinets I always disliked how grubby the knobs could get and how hard they were to clean.

My final tip to those of you planning to remodel is to take the time to think about these things before you start. I spent a fair amount of time in my kitchen just looking at what was there and thinking about how I wished it was before we did anything. I also looked at my friends’ kitchens, photos in magazines, and displays at home improvement stores. If you do that, you are much more likely to end up with the kitchen (or bath or room addition) of your dreams.

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