Everyone has their pet peeves about renovations. Surely not everyone likes an island and open shelving in their kitchen! 🙂

A range or cooktop without proper ventilation. When you walk into a house and smell food/cooking residue, it’s usually because that great-looking, updated kitchen with the massive cooktop on the island doesn’t have any ventilation, no hood in sight. (Downdraft systems look nice but only pretend to work.) In the middle of the Great Recession, I was purchasing a home in one of the northern Chicago suburbs and toured many renovated homes minus any sign of kitchen ventilation. Finally, I asked my realtor to remove all potential properties that did not have a hood. It limited the options but speeded up the process and identified the correct home (along with a basement that didn’t smell damp/wet and a fenced backyard for the dog).

A kitchen Island. Just shoot me! 😉 Every kitchen update does not need or require an island. I’m patiently waiting for a (certified) kitchen designer to say, “Enough with the islands!” There has to be a way to design the space to give people that “let’s cook together” feel without including an island.

When you have to walk through the wet area of a bathroom to reach the walk-in closet. Why would I want to slog through a bathroom to either reach my clothes or once properly dressed, walk through the bathroom to exit the bedroom? Or worse, you have to walk through the closet to reach the toilet facilities. Seems really bizarre to me. Vent or no vent in the walk-in the closet, I’m closing off the walk-in closet to any hint of moisture and odor from the bathroom.

TVs over the fireplace and placed way too high. A TV belongs in its own room, at couch height with other comfortable seating, and with good, low lighting. Not in a blazing white, open concept living space where the light from the massive windows drains the picture and you have to crane your neck to view it, and where the sound of the TV is heard throughout the entire house. (OK. So, not a fan of open concept living spaces. 🙃)

I have a feeling this is going to be significantly less interesting to people than the Pimp My Ride guy, but what the hell :p

Back in 2007, my husband and I applied to be on one of HGTV's home improvement shows, "Spice Up My Kitchen" (this is the episode we were on).

The entire physical renovation, from beginning to end, took about two weeks and cost us $7000, plus we had to pay taxes on the labor (I think it worked out to an additional $2000 - $2500 at tax time, but I don't remember). The actual value of the renovation, if I recall, was around $40,000.

The idea of the show was this: a "couple" decides that they need a renovation for a really horribly dilapidated kitchen (we had to play this up in our audition. Considering the horrific state of the kitchen, it wasn't hard). The team comes in and proposes two different design ideas, the couple picks one on the spot, and that's what the crew does. Obviously, it doesn't actually work that way -- we were given a choice of two designs, based upon what we described as our ideal kitchen, far in advance of the taping, and all the "let's go pick out your tile!" stuff was bullshit.

We still live in the house, but we've actually redone some of the kitchen. For one thing, the contractors they hired half-assed pretty much everything (put the wrong bulbs in the fixtures, didn't complete the plumbing work properly, did a shitty job on the sheetrock, caulking and painting). Now that I think about it, I don't even remember them bringing any kind of building inspector in to check the work, although they might have... hopefully the gas line they re-ran doesn't end up blowing up our house.

The other thing is, the high-end appliances they gave us (the stove retails for around $6000, the dishwasher for $2600) were all prototypes from the manufacturer's newly-released line. They are already falling apart, doors constantly coming unscrewed, and we just had to replace the four-year-old dishwasher with a new one from Sears. Neither the production company nor the manufacturers were interested in "fixing" any of these issues; we were told to call the contractor with any problems we had, after the crew left, and after getting "full mailbox" message for two months we just gave up and decided to fix any problems ourselves. The fridge will be the next thing to get replaced, but we're going to try to baby the stove for as long as we can.

Don't get me wrong: for the amount of money we spent, it was absolutley worth it -- even having to replace and redo some of the work, we're spending far, far less than we would have to get it done any other way. But at first, when people would ask us, "So, how do you like the new kitchen?" we were like, 'Yaaayy!", and now we're more like, "it's...<i>okay</i>."

Anyway, I don't know how interesting this will be to anyone, but feel free to AMA.

Edit: Hope this works. Here's what the kitchen looked like before... kitchen before

Here's when they were ripping it apart... kitchen after