Robin Burrill: Should you renovate your kitchen or bathroom first?
Living day after day with an outdated or dysfunctional kitchen is a constant source of frustration. The same is true of your bathroom, a room that should be your sanctuary, where you start and end every day.
If you navigate through a home where both spaces are malfunctioning, you’re in a special kind of nightmare. The sight of worn countertops in the kitchen along with cramped appliances and cabinets makes it a chore to cook anything. The finishes in the bathroom are so worse for wear that you can never get them properly clean anymore, and the layout of the shower and tub make getting ready an act of acrobatics.
Despite your desire for change, you grapple every day with the realization that tackling both renovations simultaneously would disrupt daily life to a breaking point. Besides, the financial strain would be colossal.
Your fantasies of the perfectly renovated kitchen and bath seem hazy. Both sit on the other side of a question you don’t know how to answer: should you renovate your kitchen or bathroom first?
Base Your Decision on One or All of These Pillars
As you weigh your options, your investment and the logistics of each project can be broken into these pillars.
Prioritize your renovations based on how these pillars break down for you.
- UrgencyTo determine whether your kitchen or bathroom renovation is more urgent, ask yourself:
- Which room’s functionality is most impacted by poor storage?
- Which room has safety concerns (for example, an awkward shower lip)?
- Which room is more unpleasant to use in daily life?
- Which room is the most energy inefficient?
- Which room do you have the bigger emotional connection with?
The room you answer for the majority of these is the more urgent room to renovate first.
- Lifestyle Benefits
The lifestyle benefits to consider are:
- Which room is more important for your social and entertaining needs?
- Which room is more important for your personal comfort and relaxation needs?
- Which room is more important for your personal wellness goals?
- Which room is more important for the happiness of others in your household?
The room you answer for the majority of these is the room that impacts your lifestyle in a bigger way.
- Scope of Work
You can prioritize the right renovation based on the required construction, too. Consider:
- The structural changes required (the room with more changes affecting your home’s plumbing, electrical, and HVAC should be done first)
- The project complexity (the room your contractor says be more complex or might present more surprises—like structural damage, outdated wiring, mold—should be first)
- Code compliance issues (the room that’s more outdated might be harder to get permits for later)
- Accessibility
Put simply, the room with the greatest accessibility concerns can also be prioritized for this reason. Even if you’re young or have no mobility problems, you never know when someone might break a leg, or what safety concerns are present when children or mobility-limited guests come to your home.
- Seasonal Considerations
The final factor you can use to prioritize your renovation is the season each renovation will take place in. If one of your renovations includes work done on exterior-facing walls, doing that in the winter might get uncomfortable.
Also, if you’ll have lots of visitors during the holidays or another time of year, it might be hard to have a kitchen renovation going on right before or after. In homes with multiple bathrooms, a bathroom renovation could be less disruptive when guests visit.
In your kitchen and bathroom fantasies, each room is a functional oasis with gleaming countertops, ample storage, and finishes that elevate your home’s aesthetic. They’re sanctuaries of nutrition, relaxation, and comfort that give you respite from the chaos of life outside your home.
As you weigh your options, these pillars bring that dream into focus. They help you find the intersection of immediate relief and long-term satisfaction. Look at your kitchen and bathroom through these five pillars above, and they show you which renovation you’ll feel best about doing first.
Will you prioritize your kitchen or bathroom renovation based on one of these pillars above? Or will you use all five to see which room appears the most?
By: CEO/Principal Designer of Signature Home Services, Robin Burrill, RID, NCIDQ, ASID, IDS, CAPS
Kitchen! 1000 times kitchen! There are so many little things that drive me nuts. Lifestyle benefits and getting RID of those little unpleasantries that drive me wild when I cook, those are the “pillars” that make the kitchen my focus.