Mark Mitten  0:04  
Remove the wall, keep the window, move the window, keep the wall, keep the wall. Get cherry cabinets. You better call Paul.

Paul McAlary  0:32  
Hi, Katie, can you hear me?

Katie  0:33  
I can thank you for taking my call.

Paul McAlary  0:36  
Sure. Welcome the calls with Paul. I'm looking at all the plans and drawings that you sent me. We talked a little bit before we put you on the podcast, and you were thinking that you were going to take out a load bearing wall between your dining room and your kitchen, that it would be very expensive. And I'm looking at it, it's not a particularly long wall, so it definitely wouldn't be that expensive. In fact, I would think that some of the ideas that you have I really like a lot, but some of them are going to cost maybe more than you think. Like in the drawing that you sent me, you're changing your windows right? You have a window right now over the sink in your kitchen, and you're going to close that window up and put in two new windows. That's

Katie  1:21  
correct. I'm it is definitely going to cost more than leaving the window where it is. Regardless, I am replacing the window about the sink, because it's currently a very short and narrow window, almost like what you would find in a basement, and then the previous owners had cabinets above that. Okay, so no matter what, I'm going to be enlarging the existing window, which then led me, but yes, it would be more to close that up and then add two windows in different locations. For sure.

Paul McAlary  1:57  
What's your house outside of your house made out of? Is it stucco? Is it siding? Is it brick?

Katie  2:04  
It's um, just wood with vinyl siding,

Paul McAlary  2:07  
wood with vinyl siding. So that's not going to be that bad changing the windows, but certainly it's still a little bit less expensive. If you just enlarged the window and kept it relatively in the same location, or you could even move it a little bit. If you made it bigger, you could make it bigger in one direction instead of centering it right? And if you did that, you'd just be making a bigger hole than you had before, and just cutting away siding, you wouldn't be having to patch any siding. Right? Yes, definitely. So I mean, not that that's going to be that big a deal either. I would think that moving the windows and making two windows instead of one window, and then doing the siding and everything else, it might actually be similar in price. Probably it will be a little bit less than taking out the load bearing wall. But then when you take out the load bearing wall too, you're also going to end up maybe with a little bit less cabinetry, just because you're not going to have wall cabinets on that wall anymore. And that will probably make the difference between total cost of the project so and then, generally, we always try to remind people that you're spending so much money that like a customer, customers come to us all the time, and they, you know, they're very adamant, I want green cabinets, let's say and green isn't a popular, a really popular color right now. So we know that if you're going to get a green colored kitchen, that that color is going to cost you at least 35% more for your cabinets just to get into a cabinet brand that offers that green or to get a custom color in a less expensive brand. So just upgrading your countertops or your appliances, or getting a different color cabinet or even a different door style, those things can easily cost as much as taking out the load bearing wall. So it's always better to splurge on the stuff that maybe if you wanted the bigger space, it's always good to splurge to open up the room if you wanted to do do that instead of getting green settle. Settle for gray, which is a popular color that's available on all cabinet brands. So just something to think about. I mean, I'm looking at your dining room, and it really, it is really a pretty big dining and

Katie  4:30  
it is, and I'm debating, because it's such a large like the kitchen, the dining room is actually larger than the kitchen, which is just the way the house was built. So I'm I couldn't really, because of the forest hot air ducts, they go to the second floor. So I couldn't really remove the load bearing wall. I think I would have to basically relocate it to make the dining room smaller and the kitchen larger. So then I was debating if that's. Really worth it, versus just trying to make better use of the dining room state space, like maybe putting a pantry in there, or some type of mini bar, type of setup to kind of take some stuff out of the kitchen into the dining room without having to move a whole wall.

Paul McAlary  5:17  
Now that we know that you have forced hot air and the duct work is also going up the wall. That's the harder thing than the load bearing part. The duct work is the harder part of the two things. But I'm also looking at your house, and it doesn't look to me like it even is a load bearing wall. It looks like the load you know, your stairs are going in that direction? Yeah, it could be a load bearing. Well, when you go into the basement, is there? Do the joists go from the mud room to the towards the dining room? Is that the way the joists run?

Katie  5:55  
Yeah, and I have torn down the kitchen ceiling because it was this, it was falling down. It was one of those staple up ceilings. And yeah, the floor joists definitely run from the mud room towards, okay, the front of the house. And they like, they sort of overlap some, but they definitely overlap on top of the current wall, okay?

Paul McAlary  6:21  
And then how many ducks do you have in that wall that are running up that wall? Is it like two or something or three? It's two. It's two, and they go into a bedroom on the next on the floor upstairs,

Katie  6:34  
um, one ends, one seeds the dining room. So one is the dining room key, and then the other one goes to the upstairs bedroom, correct? So

Paul McAlary  6:44  
if you really wanted to entertain it, it might not be that big a deal. And the reason that it might not be such a big deal is, first off, the one that goes into the dining room. You can run that anywhere you want and come out of the floor. A very easy thing to do is, if you did your kitchen design and you had cabinetry on top of where the duct was coming out, you would just have the duct come out the bottom of the cabinet right into the into the so that duct isn't a problem at all, and the one that goes to the second floor depends on how the rooms are done, but you have that funny bump out chimney in the dining room right. What's to the left of that chimney when I'm looking, if you're staring at the chimney, will be the to the right of the chimney is that just a little nook?

Katie  7:34  
It is? It used to be like walled in as this dead space, and then I took that wall out to expose the brick chimney. And now it is kind of an awkward nook that I was debating putting, like a bookcase or some type of built in into, but, yeah, it's currently just an awkward nook.

Paul McAlary  7:54  
So let's say you put a bookcase into it, the chimney looks like it's two feet deep. Really, you don't want a bookcase any deeper than one foot so you could put a book or a 12 inch cabinet bookcase, but it probably is cheaper just to make it a painted shelving bookcase, and then in back of that bookcase, if you made the bookcase even with your chimney, you would have an empty one foot space. And in that empty foot space, you could run the duct that you're getting rid of, and then you, if we were lucky, I don't know what this second floor is like, but you, if you ran that duct up the wall there, maybe it ends up in the same room as it did before. Do you have any okay

Katie  8:40  
that it? I think it would, yeah.

Paul McAlary  8:45  
So if that was the case, you run it up the wall, you can even close in the top of the bookcase, so the duck can come up in the back, go up to the top of the bookcase, come over a foot, and then go into the floor of the room upstairs, and now you've got heat in that room, if it's the same room, and this is still going to cost you, if we said $3,000 for a load bearing wall, and it was around here, and then you got these ductworks, that might be another couple of $1,000 so now you're talking about throwing $5,000 into this project, and then you're also building a either you're going to build the bookcase, or you can just close the whole side of the chimney in there, just drywall it and keep it from being in a funny nook, and then have it all be one closed in area. You have to just decide if that's worth it or not. But in the grand scheme of things, I think if you ask most people nowadays, we're getting much less formal as time goes by. And so your kitchen, especially the way you designed it, which I like, is not an eat in kitchen. So. It's a kitchen, but anytime you want to eat, you have to go into your dining room, and so that actually hurts the value of your home, because you know you're cooking dinner and your kids are sitting at the table in the dining room, you can't even talk to them because you're working in a room that doesn't have a table in it. And every time anybody wants a glass of milk or a glass of wine or something like that. They have to come, you know, stick their head in the doorway and say, you know, can I get a glass of milk or go to the or go to the refrigerator themselves? If you take out that wall, you have what we call communication between the working kitchen and the table that everybody's eating at. And that's a very, very desirable thing, and having a room that's not an eat in kitchen detracts from the value of your home, in a great respect, because it doesn't have communication. So I think that if it's me, I take out the wall first and then get less expensive cabinetry. Guess less expensive countertops, get less expensive. Appliances do other things that will save money other places. And one way you can save money is you can leave the window where it is, and that won't hurt you in any way. You'll have lots of different designs that you could do leaving the window if you if you wanted that to be the way that you save the money.

Katie  11:22  
Okay? That's helpful to know what you know, where the value is in a kitchen remodel. Because, I mean, part of what I was sort of disappointed about with the design that I came up with was that I couldn't fit an island in the kitchen. But an island isn't really I mean, you can put bar stools at it and have breakfast and that it's not really a place to have dinner. So what you really need is a large enough space to fit, you know, a table that people can sit and eat at and the kitchen, and then you're lucky if you get an island too. Yeah, I don't

Paul McAlary  11:57  
think you're ever going to fit an island in your kitchen. That's going to be something that you can sit at really especially because I really like that you move the other doorway and put the refrigerator in the corner. That's one of the primary rules of kitchen design is we want to get your refrigerator all the tall things we want to get into the corner. So if you have a big pantry cabinet or a pantry closet. I would say a pantry cabinet would look much nicer, but if you had a big pantry cabinet, and then you could even have a smaller pantry cabinet, then have the refrigerator with a cabinet over the top of the refrigerator panel on the side of the refrigerator to close it in, and then you'd still before you got to the doorway, it looks to me like you've got 100 inches. So if we gave you an 18 inch pantry and then a 36 inch refrigerator, than a one inch panel, that's 55 you could still have a countertop and bottom cabinets and top cabinets before you got to the doorway, and that could be like a coffee bar or a place for the microwave to go, or a beverage center, or whatever you would want over in that corner. And then you'd have a 18 inch wide pantry, the refrigerator, and then some cabinets and countertop over there that would be pretty convenient on your way out the door, or something like that, to put stuff down when you open the refrigerator door, you'd have countertop right there to put stuff down on, you know.

Katie  13:26  
Okay, so you're not opposed to having the refrigerator removed from the you I know, you know, I personally kind of like it there, because when I put the fridge with the stove and the sink and the windows, it was just this behemoth that sort of blocked a lot of the sight lines and the light coming in from the windows. So that's why I put it over on that other wall. But some people look at that and they say, Oh, you really should move the door and make a nice, you know, traditional U shaped kitchen. No,

Paul McAlary  14:03  
we do. It's the opposite. Okay, you did what all kitchen designers would do first. And anybody that's, oh, that's fantastic. Anybody that's telling you not to do that, they're thinking that these things are really important, that they're close together. And it's the opposite, because your refrigerator, you know, it's a tall, big, deep thing. It's so much better if you stuff it into the corner. It's not jutting out into the room. But it's good for another reason too. Like, when you're cooking, you go to the refrigerator and you take stuff out to cook. But while you're cooking, if you're having a party or something, there's people go into the refrigerator all the time, and now they're going to the refrigerator getting stuff. They're not in your way. They're not in the U. So because you refrigerator out of the U, you can take three steps over and go to the refrigerator and get whatever you need to cook. But then when you leave and go to the working part of the U, there's no reason for anybody to be there bothering you. They just need to go to the refrigerator, and they'll be out of. Away. So it's perfect. And then as far as the island goes, Yeah, you don't really have room for an island, but if you do get rid of the wall between the dining room and the kitchen, you can have seating at the peninsula, so where your sink is, your design. You could keep the sink there. You could move the sink to other places too, we could talk about but you can have the countertop stick out a couple of feet in back of the sink, and have people sitting at a bar top because your dining room is almost square. And if you run the table in your dining room, where is the dining door? Is it all the way in that corner

Katie  15:38  
to go from the kitchen to the dining room. It's

Paul McAlary  15:42  
no from the yeah to the upstairs coming to the from the front door to the dining room. Where's the door? Oh

Katie  15:48  
yeah, it's, it's by the front door. So basically, at the bottom of the stairs, it's like open, and you can go from the dining room straight across into the living room, or up the stairs or out the front door. So

Paul McAlary  16:03  
it's, is the door all the way in the very corner, or is it like, yeah, oh, it's all the way in the corner. So it is. So if it's all the way in the corner, it's a little bit a little bit more problematic, because it would be great if your dining room table could go from the bottom of your drawing to the top of your drawing, and if it did that, you just have that much more space for your kitchen and for seating and everything else. But probably because the doorway is there, you need your dining room table to go in the other direction, or actually, for you, maybe a big, giant, round dining room table works pretty well, too. You're sort of stuck because the stairs start and the doorways in the corner. So like right now, your dining room table, I'm sure, goes from the back mud room towards the front of the house, right? It's going in that direction,

Katie  16:59  
it does, but I could get a smaller one, or, like you said, a round one actually would be a good idea if I was to make the dining room smaller. And

Paul McAlary  17:10  
you could make a round one, a bigger round one that accepted leaves. And then if you did want to sit a whole lot more people, you could add the leaves to it, like a big round one, a four foot table comfortably sits, really five. A five foot round table is like what a wedding is, and that very comfortably sits six. And then if you put a couple of leaves in it, you could extend it whenever you were having a big party or something like that, and then you just tuck your stools in, if you were having that Peninsula and taking out the wall. Did you have, like, a budget for that you wanted to do your project for? What do you want me to, sort of, I don't know if sometimes you have people haven't gotten far enough to sort of know what kind of numbers they're getting into. Do you want me to, sort of tell you how much it would be if you were doing it around here.

Katie  18:05  
That might be helpful. I started getting, well, I got an initial estimate for cabinets based upon the floor plan that you're looking at with, sort of the U with the fridge on the fourth wall. And because I, this is my first kitchen remodel, and I really have very little idea what I'm getting myself into. But also, this is a relatively modest in town, you know, it's, it's not a mansion or a very nice house by any stretch of the imagination. So I'm trying to keep the budget reasonable, even though I do tend to have pretty extensive taste, so trying to come up with like, a happy middle ground, so that I don't spend more than I should in terms of resale but also so that it does contribute to the value of the house, and I end up with a functional and beautiful kitchen.

Paul McAlary  19:03  
So what was the number you got for cabinets?

Katie  19:07  
Um, I think for craft made, it was going to be 17,000 and that was to do like the fridge, the counters next to the fridge, the U shaped cabinets. And then I was going to do uppers, which is debatable, but I was going to do uppers above the three foot nine section to the left of the U, and then above the sink and the dishwasher to the right of the U. And then I wasn't going to put any uppers on the window wall with the stove,

Paul McAlary  19:40  
okay, the $17,000 I'm thinking you weren't upgrading craft made to all plywood construction and maybe soft close doors and drawers,

Katie  19:50  
I think. So, yeah, it was the, it's the craft made Vantage. Line made Vantage

Paul McAlary  19:54  
then that's a good price, but so I would just say that's the first place I would save money. What door sound finishing craft made? Were you getting?

Katie  20:04  
Yeah, that's a good question. I picked a raised panel, and I definitely want stained wood. I priced out their cherry, because I personally don't love maple, just the way it takes up the stain. So I was looking at stained cherry in a raised panel. And I was going to contact them back to ask what the difference would be for a flat panel door. Because, like you said, if I can save $3,000 to a flat panel door and then put that money towards the wall to make a more functional space, that would probably be worth it. Yeah,

Paul McAlary  20:41  
the flat panel door will save you some money, but probably the raised panel door that you picked, if it was a veneer, raised panel door, there's two different kinds of panels. It could be a solid wood panel in the middle, or it could be a veneer. If it's a veneer, maybe it's only going to save you 10 or 12% if it was a solid panel door, then it's going to save you a bunch. Then maybe it's going to save you 20 25% but craft made is a pretty expensive cabinet brand. But the only problem is the wood and the colors that you like, like cherry, you can't get cherry wood in that inexpensive a cabinet line. So like, generally, if you were to do something, let's say you picked an inexpensive cabinet brand, like we sell. Fabulous is the most popular of the inexpensive brands we sell. There's no cherry colors in fabulous. You could do like a maple ish color, but you don't like that color, you could do all kinds of painted colors the cabinets. If there was $17,000 in craft made, it's about 40% less in fabulous

Katie  21:53  
Oh, wow.

Paul McAlary  21:54  
So $17,000 so maybe it would be $12,000 in fab wood. So then that's $5,000 that you would save, right? But now you can't get your cherry. That's sort of as kitchen designers, our life is easy, so we just give people all these alternatives, and then they have to decide what's the poison pill they're going to live with, right? So, you know, getting your charity cost you $5,000 because the Fauci wood is all plywood construction. It's the same construction and the same hinges and the same tracks as craft made. It just doesn't have the colors that you like so and the kind of wood like. So you could go to a one level up and pick a brand like that's in between. Like we sell several, we sell integrity, we sell a timber Lake, which is now called 1951 those are usually about 20% less than craft made. So if craft made is $17,000 maybe you're looking at 14,000 or 14 and a half 1000, and then you'll be able to get cherry Okay, that's sort of the rub. It's the reason to get more expensive cabinet brand like, if you happen to test say you will get getting a shaker white kitchen or gray kitchen, then it would be a waste of money to be in craft made, right? Because the reason that it's more expensive is because it offers all these things, and you're picking the things that they offer that inexpensive brands that are well made don't offer. That's just part of the decision making process. And then if we said, how much is this whole project going to cost you? Let's say you did spend $17,000 on the cabinets, and you spent then your countertops. I don't know if you looked at countertops, but most of the time, the least expensive kind of countertops you would get would be granite countertops. But everybody wants quartz countertops nowadays, for some reason.

Katie  23:55  
So the court I'm an oddball. I want granite. Oh, so then if you're getting a

Paul McAlary  23:59  
lower level granite color. The lower level granite colors for your whole kitchen might be $2,500 for your countertop, but you also might go and find out that the only granite colors you like are the $6,000 granite countertops, but there'll be lots of colors to choose from that will be around $2,500 or at around here at least that you would look at. But so let's say you spent $3,000 on your countertop, because that gets you $20,000 so now you're at $20,000 and are you getting all new appliances? I am. So let's say you're getting all brand new appliances, and you're going to get stainless steel appliances and maybe a counter depth refrigerator, but you're not going to get anything crazy expensive. You're going to get like, GE profile or something like that. Then maybe you're going to spend depends on what you do with your stove and your design, if you got a expensive hood, then maybe now we got to figure out where your microwave is going to go, and then if you got you. If your microwave is going to go underneath the countertop, then that's a $1,200 microwave. So now you're spending extra money on a hood and extra money on a microwave, so your appliances probably are going to cost you somewhere between four and a half and $7,000 depending on what microwave solution and what hood solution you pick. But, but again, if you got a different design and you put your stove and you put a microwave hood over your stove, it doesn't have a nice it's not now, not a nice hood or whatever, but that gets your microwave off the countertop. Doesn't look quite as fancy, but it also saves you $2,000 or more on appliances, and then it got your microwave off your countertop. It's just another possibility, but so let's just take an average number and say you spend five and a half $1,000 on appliances. Then we have flooring. What's the flooring in your dining room?

Katie  25:59  
The flooring in the dining room is hardwood, oak, okay, so that, and I'm debating putting that in the kitchen as well. Okay,

Paul McAlary  26:08  
so if you took out the wall, if that was the choice that you decided to do, because we can just, well, I'll give you the thing of, what if you take out the wall, and what if you don't too but so say, but the flooring isn't going to affect any of that. So you, when you redid your floor, you would just make sure that the cabinets covered where the old wall was, so that and then you have a threshold or whatever in between the two rooms so that it wouldn't it wouldn't it would there be no difference whether or not it took out the wall and didn't take out the wall and how much flooring you'd have. So then if you did your flooring in that room, that's 50 square feet. So we'll just add another $1,000 without the installation, maybe with backsplash tiles, sinks, faucets and handles. Oh, and then you have a new door that you're going to be getting, maybe right, and then possibly new windows. But we've got you up to $28,000 in stuff. And if you're going to get a brand new door, when you redo your door and you get into new windows, maybe the materials that you're buying for this project will will be $30,000 and then the cost of the construction to do all this work when you get estimates, the best way to get competitive estimates is to get your whole kitchen designed and have a plan with drawings that you give to the contractors, and they all bid on the same thing, and you're giving them the plan that You're going to be doing, and then the different contractors are bidding on it. So there's nothing that's uncertain. They know that you're going to take out the wall. They know that you're going to be moving this duct if that's what's happening, or the moving the windows and not moving the windows. And the difference in price, we just had a customer that we recommended two contractors, and this was a gigantic kitchen project. So it's, don't let these numbers frighten you. It's not like your kitchen but it was a gigantic kitchen project. One contractor we sent out gave our customer an estimate for $73,000 and the other contractor, wow, gave them an estimate for $83,000 and then they had another contractor on their own that I've worked with, and I know that he's very expensive, but he does good work, but he's also very expensive, and he doesn't his work isn't any better than the people we recommended. You know, I thought he'd be like $150,000 well, they got the estimate back from him, and he was $237,000 so Wow, one contractor is bidding 237,000 and another one's bidding 73,000 and we know that they both do a really good job. So when you're shopping for contractors, that's the one area that there will be a huge difference in how much prices are, and the prices don't necessarily reflect at all how good a job the people are going to do. Some really expensive contractors. I know that would charge $237,000 are actually terrible. They just have a whole lot of people working for them, and they're greedy, and they don't really have good oversight on projects, and you know, you're spending a fortune, and they're not even good at what they do. And then some guys are maybe too cheap, but around us for all the work that you're talking about having done, if you did everything the most expensive, you move the windows and you move took out the load bearing wall and move the duct work and move your other doorway, we could probably find people that were around the same $30,000 that your materials are going to cost, but that would be the lowest we would probably find somebody. But that's also assuming you're doing everything. You're moving the windows, you're. Moving the back door, you're taking out the load bearing wall, you're moving the duct work. So you got $60,000 for the project, and it can definitely be less if you don't take out the wall, and you don't get craft made, and you don't do some other stuff, you can, you know, maybe get it all the way down to under, well under 50, if you did everything inexpensively, and then it can grow to astronomical numbers if you start splurging on things and getting Sub Zero refrigerators or wolf stoves and things like that. But if you said $60,000 that's probably a doable number, but you're going to have to find a contractor that's not the $237,000 guy, you're going to have to find a reasonable contractor to do it for that

Katie  30:46  
and interesting. Okay,

Paul McAlary  30:48  
how close to Washington, DC are you?

Katie  30:53  
Well, I'm located in New Hampshire. Oh, okay, we have, we have a huge shortage of reliable contractors in our area, I would say it's very difficult to find people to do good work, and most of them are scheduling out six months because they're so busy. So this is fine, but I'll just have to get estimates. And

Paul McAlary  31:19  
yeah, that also means that $30,000 is never happening for you.

Katie  31:23  
So no,

Paul McAlary  31:26  
you know, unfortunately, that might mean $30,000 is more like 60, but it's all the same money tubes, right? So you really have to just decide, got to get a whole bunch of estimates and really figure out if you do want to take out the wall. But I think that that's the thing that makes your house the most desirable to other people. Okay, once it's all open, then it's, you know, an open concept people would nowadays rather have a more casual open concept kitchen, etc, and not even, not even have a formal dining room. They'd rather have an office than a formal dining room. You have to decide that, and you have to get the numbers, especially because you're in an area that's tough to get contractors. And you know, the other thing too about contractors is it's all dependent on the contractors. But as they get busier, too, if the job is getting more and more complicated, they're okay if they don't get that job. So they'll charge you a whole Yeah, they'll charge you a whole lot more money, just because it's not as easy as they'd like it. But you know, then again, some of the guys too, are very different. They want to be proud of their work, and so they're happy if the job is going to be really attractive because it makes them feel good about what they did, and then they're actually going to cut you a break on maybe anything that's making the kitchen a lot better. It's all dependent on the people that you're finding. Maybe you really want to design it two different ways and sort of get the numbers

Katie  32:59  
and get the numbers. Yeah, so if I find that removing the wall and moving the ducks is going to be kind of a lot, and also push out my timeline just to find a qualified contractor to do that work, would having the sink facing the wall be like, especially undesirable as well, because I know that's another thing that a lot of people balk at, is they say, Well, you shouldn't have a sink facing a wall. Why wouldn't you put the sink where the stove is? Yeah, I personally feel like I spend more time cooking, and would rather be looking out the window, if I'm, you know, chopping vegetables and assuming that cleanup is a little quicker with a dishwasher, which I don't currently have, but I just don't know if, if that's, you know, really frowned upon. Now, I

Paul McAlary  33:52  
would say that you don't want your sink facing the wall. So if you're going not taking out the wall, then you can keep your sink where it is, keep your window where it is, and then move your stove where you have the sink. Okay. I mean, that's one solution, and there's a bunch of different solutions too. You could, if you're going to redo windows too, you could put your stove where your sink is on that wall, and then make the window bigger, but make it bigger towards the left, so that it's not centered on the in the room. It just you're making it bigger to the left. And then that also gives you more countertop between the stove and the sink. Okay, you have a 32 inch doorway plus trim, and then you left 30 inches in the corner where the refrigerator is, if you really wanted to even move your stove over to that area. Or, you know, the other thing too is, I don't know where the duct is. Where's the duck going up to the second floor? Is it right in front of the sink? Yeah? You know, yes, well, against the wall, yeah,

Katie  35:05  
the one that goes to the second floor is in front of the sink, and the one that feeds the dining room is in front of the sink and dishwasher, sort of, I would say, Yeah.

Paul McAlary  35:15  
You'd have to move the duct and it would be nice maybe to open a window into the dining room, if you didn't take out the wall, but then you'd have to move the duck to do that. So that's sort of, yeah, you did keep your window where it is, and just make it bigger and make it bigger to the left. Then you could have your stove where the sink is, and the sink over on the other leg, you know, and then you bent out your stove, you have 94 and a half inch ceilings. So hopefully your ceiling is relatively level, you have to find out. But if you had got 36 inch high wall cabinets, they come up to 90 inches. And then you could run a four inch duct in between the mold at the top of the cabinets and the molding that's reaching the ceiling, and then run the duct out that way. Okay, I don't know what the numbers are that you're going to get for the construction part of it, but it's,

Katie  36:12  
yeah, that's okay. It's really that's interesting.

Paul McAlary  36:16  
I mean, once you take out the wall, now you know, you could keep the sink there, and then it's good, right? And then you can just have it be a deeper countertop. And then even if the sink is there, yeah, make it like a you can put one foot cabinets in back of the sink cabinet, so that you'll have to go underneath the countertop to get to those one foot cabinets. But then you'll have two feet of countertop there, and then you can be sitting at that eating or whatever, and then the person that's at the sink is talking to the people that are in the dining room. You know, you'll have Peninsula seating and the dining room table, and you know, so now you got two seating areas, and then when you move your refriger, what I'll do is, I'll send you the drawing with hand, like hand done with how I would do it, if you got rid of the wall, just so you can sort of see that version, just by, yeah, I

Katie  37:13  
think trying to picture it, it seems like that would be, I mean, that would be a much larger, or it would feel larger because it'd be more open, but I feel like it would look more expensive. Like you said, it gave a more desirable option, for sure,

Paul McAlary  37:32  
if you did that too, you could even leave the window where it is and put the stove on the 75 inch countertop side, so that the stove and the sink are opposite each other. And you could also make that 30 inches that you have between the refrigerator and the corner there. That 30 inches doesn't really have to be 30 inches to the trim. It could be 27 and that would work totally fine. And then, okay, you could use a 32 inch doorway, but it's totally normal to use a 30 inch doorway if you wanted to have just a doorway that was two inches smaller. And the reason that we're saving these inches, inch by inch, is then the doorway with the trim will be like 35 inches. So you'll save three, and then you'll get another seven and a half. And then your countertop and everything that's on the other side will be more like 81 inches, instead of 75 inches, from the corner of the wall to the trim. And then when your stove is over there, now you'll have this huge amount of countertop that you can be working at, and you don't have to move the window, though. You can just make the window bigger. Now you'll be looking out the window when you're working, right? So okay, so I'll do that drawing just so that you can sort of see what I'm talking about. And then even when you do that, you're gonna have such a long countertop that you can actually move the whole sink, run more into the kitchen, and then when you put the 12 inch cabinets I was talking about in the back of the sink facing in the other direction, they can end right where the wall ended, so that the only thing that's going to be sticking into the dining room now is 12 extra inches of countertop that you're sitting at, so Your Peninsula isn't going to be making your dining room that much smaller at all, and because you don't have an island, moving everything together a little bit is no problem, especially if the stove goes on the 75 inch run, okay, and it's better too, because you know, if you're cooking, having like, two feet nine inches to work at on either side of your stove is you don't even have three feet to work at right. So it's not exactly, yeah, a whole lot of space to work at. And certainly the one on the two feet, nine inches on the left, doesn't do you any good. If someone's standing at the sink, they're in your way. So then you'll be working at the other two countertops. One that's three feet nine and one that's 2.9 but it's easier to work at the two feet nine inch countertop. So now you're working over on that one side. So it's just not a great expanse of countertop to work at, versus if that's all countertop along that whole side wall with a window in the middle. Now you got all of this countertop to work at. You could be making pizza if you want, right? Yeah, so, so much room, so I'll do that and send it to you so you can see what you think about that, and, you know, maybe put that one in the mix.

Katie  40:34  
Okay, yeah, I would really appreciate that. It's been extremely helpful to hear some fresh perspectives, and honestly, some things that I definitely hadn't thought of. So yeah, I'd love to see what that looks like.

Paul McAlary  40:48  
And once you get to maybe designs that you're going to have the contractors bid on too, there's almost no rhyme or reason sometimes for the numbers that different contractors give you. It's always surprised one contractor will, you know, give you a price of $12,000 to take out the load bearing wall, and the other guy will give you a price of $2,000 or one guy will give you a price of $12,000 to move the two windows, and the other guy, another guy, will give you $3,000 to do the same thing. You know, they might have reversed it. So it's just what they sort of individually perceive as being a pain in the neck. Really sure one guy had a problem where he was adding their two windows and then they didn't have enough siding, and he had to get some more siding. Usually, we would steal siding from another part of the house behind the bush and use that or something like that when I was a contractor, but then you have some customer that it wouldn't match perfectly, and then they'd want, they'd make they'd be screaming and yelling and telling you going to sue you. They want their whole side of their house redone. And all of a sudden, one contractors has some kind of mental pain point over, you know, over replace over, working with old siding, and suddenly he just adds $10,000 to every siding job that he does. So you know, it doesn't hurt you to get more estimates. And since it's such a huge variation, if you're getting out of crazy numbers, just don't stop. Just get a few more if you can.

Katie  42:19  
Okay, that makes sense.

Paul McAlary  42:21  
Okay, so any other questions, or anything, or

Katie  42:25  
I don't think so. I think those were all of my, my big questions.

Paul McAlary  42:29  
Okay, yeah, so just to recap, how much construction you're doing in these contractors is areas that are going to be huge differences in numbers that you want to investigate. And then, as far as like the cabinets go, there'll be brands that will be a lot less expensive than craft made, but they won't have cherry so you'd have to look at the colors that they did have and see if you liked any of them, Timberlake or 1951 or Yeah, home crest is another one that's a middle of the road cabinet brand, but there'll be, you know, there'll be some inexpensive cabinet brands that are still apply with construction stuff, soft close doors, soft close drawers. So they'll be made the same as craft made, and they can be up to 40% less, but they just won't have the cherry color that you like. All that stuff. It's all up for grabs. Get all the pricing, and then figure out what kind of budget you want to do, and, you know, maybe get the numbers from the contractors, and then change your mind about what you want to do if they're high too.

Katie  43:30  
Yeah, definitely it's a lot of a lot of moving parts and a lot of places where you can splurge or save money. So I'll definitely have to do some soul searching and look at my options.

Paul McAlary  43:42  
Well, I'm crossing my fingers you'll find a good contractor and and I'll send you those drawings in a few minutes.

Katie  43:50  
Okay, thank you so much. 

Paul McAlary  43:52  
Okay, Katie, good

talking to you, bye, bye,

Mark Mitten  43:54  
Thank you for listening to the mainline kitchen design podcast with nationally acclaimed Kitchen Designer Paul McAlary. This podcast is brought to you by Brighton cabinetry, high quality custom cabinetry at competitive prices. For more on kitchen cabinets and kitchen design, go to www dot mainline kitchen design.com.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai