Early on in the design process, when he had first gotten a plan together, I asked him to finalize two areas for me and keep them that size until the final plans - the kitchen and the master bath. While the architect was busy finalizing the floor plans, I took the kitchen and bath dimensions to various kitchen and bath places to finalize those details. (Pic 1-Kitchen)Once again, I went with my magic number – 3. I first walked into a showroom and asked them to provide a set of plans and a price quote. I told them I had tall cabinets in mind with a plane solid look. The only plane set of cabinets this showroom had had rounded corners. No way. And let me tell you this is no shabby showroom. In fact, I know several houses in our neighborhood have used this showroom for their kitchen and bath designs. Not only were the cabinets not what I wanted (ugly), but they were expensive. The cabinets alone would have cost me $50k. The deal was that if I did not sign a contract with them, I could not get the plans. Ha! The one design idea I took away from here was the cut of the kitchen island. (Pic 2- Kitchen)
So off to the second showroom, their models looked promising. I met with a woman and told her my vision of a kitchen. I wanted an island with a small seating area. We planned a really large window on one wall and I planned to have two tall cabinets on either side with no countertop in between. Regarding the rest of the room, I did not want hung cabinets over my stove countertop – the whole length of that wall. I am not sure what she heard. When I went back to look at the design, it was like they picked up a generic kitchen and hadn’t listen to one thing I had said. In fact, I looked to see if they had accommodated anything I had asked for. Nope. So I restated my vision of the kitchen. The man (who had joined the meeting) said, you might not know this, but you are real cutting edge in design. So where are your cutting edge design ideas, my dears? Anyhow, this place was a no as well, if they weren’t listening to me first, what are the chances they will listen going forward. Did I walk away with anything from here? I liked their idea of the mudroom layout. At this point I had planned on buying a new washer and dryer set. But we ended up keeping our old ones so we couldn’t use their design idea. I can still recreate it if need to. I have it in the back of my mind and if my washer/dryer die, we can redo the laundry/mudroom. But being such a skinflint, I probably wont.
By this time we were getting close to the final plans with the architect. He suggested a builder. Long story short, we went with the builder the architect recommended. The builder gave me a list of vendors and people to contact to go over the design details and finishes. So the third place for kitchen and bath was recommended by the builder. What an amazing showroom, I loved half the kitchen models in there. The young man who worked with me to plan out the kitchen was thrilled that I had come to him so early and he could truly design a custom kitchen. We had nearly 6 months to work on the kitchen plans and I got the kitchen of my dreams. (Pic 3-Master Bath)A funny thing with the kitchen designs – he emailed the very first set of plans and their 3-D visuals to me. The color on the walls was beige. My first reaction as soon as I opened the file was to close it right away. After a deep breath, I reopened them and paid closer attention to the plan itself. I was happy to note he had listened to a lot of my ideas and planned a pretty good kitchen for me. I emailed back letting him know my first reaction to the beige color. I had a lime green color in mind for my kitchen. So he promptly emailed the same plans and 3-Ds back to me in lime green. Lovely! From here it was just a matter of minor tweaking, picking out the details. Two additions we squeezed into the kitchen were a narrow spice rack cabinet and shelves along the side of kitchen wall for cookbooks, phone etc.
I also visited the lighting vendors and walked through the house and identified various kinds of lighting. I haven’t counted the different kinds of bulbs in our house. It seems as though every time a bulb goes out, it is not easily available in the stores and I end up getting it from their lighting showroom. It goes without saying the bulbs are expensive, but the fact that they seem to last so long seem quite promising. (Pic 4-Master Bath)The only light fixture I couldn’t decide on were the ones over our kitchen island. You know that funky kind. When the house was being built, I finally picked on a pair that was supposed to be red. When they arrived, they were orange. Now I have no orange anywhere in the house, so I had to add orange. I picked bar stools with orange seat covers, I found dining chairs that are an orange leather, we even painted our old (many times painted) piano orange!! Now I have a whole lot of orange because of 2 lights.
I also had the time to visit the flooring place and after considering various options I decided to do the whole house in bamboo flooring. Basement would be bare concrete and the mudroom would have vinyl – we have snake skin leather looking vinyl floor. It is very cool.
By the time our architect’s plans were finalized I had the kitchen and bath designs finalized and priced, as well as, the lighting fixtures. My architect’s estimate for the house he had designed was $400k. Remember, I had asked for $350k. Not bad. So now my builder looked at the plans and drew up a contract which he claimed couldn’t be done for less that $425k. I reviewed the contract closely and found he had given really small allowances for kitchen, bath, flooring, lighting, plumbing etc. It is the finishes of the house that are expensive. By now I had pretty good estimates for kitchen, bath, appliances, lighting and flooring so I asked the builder to increase those allowances. I still have no idea how plumbing slipped right under my radar. And even if I had no time to pick out fixtures at that point, the experience from the other line items in the budget should have raised a red flag with regard to the plumbing budget. Our plumbing budget was set at $5k, the bath tub in the master bath cost $5k! So now the budget came back to me at about $525k. I said, ok, lets build.,.
Copyright Kalpana Kanwar August 2009
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