Plan Your Kitchen Before You Spend a Dollar

It depends most on kitchen size, door style/finish, box construction and hardware, with countertops and appliances on top. The biggest DIY saving is the install itself, which is often a large share of a professionally-quoted kitchen.

In about 90% of kitchens the flooring goes first — it gives a clean, continuous floor and makes appliances easier to swap later. The exception is a floating floor (some laminate or vinyl plank): install the cabinets first and float the floor around them with an expansion gap, so the heavy cabinets don’t trap it.

Cabinet installation runs roughly a day per run once everything is on site, but the whole project spans the lead time to plan, order and receive cabinets, plus countertop templating and trade hook-ups. Order early to avoid waiting.

For most confident homeowners, yes — the cabinet work is very doable and the install is where the biggest savings are. Keep the specialised, higher-risk work (gas, water, electrical, stone) with the pros.

Demo and repair, then measure, design and order, assemble the cabinets, install base then wall cabinets, template and fit the countertop, complete plumbing/gas/electrical, and finish with doors, handles and toe kicks.

Three tiers. Paint (a few hundred dollars DIY) refreshes sound boxes when you like the layout — prep is everything or it chips. Reface keeps the boxes and swaps the doors, drawer fronts and end panels for a like-new face at roughly a third to half the cost of replacing. Replace when the boxes are water-damaged or you want a different layout or more storage — it is the only option that changes how the kitchen actually works.

Kill the power to the kitchen, take off the doors and drawers, and disconnect the sink, water and any built-in appliances first. Score the caulk line where each cabinet meets the wall with a utility knife, back out the screws in the back rail with a helper steadying the box, then lift it away and patch the holes. Take the wall cabinets down before the base cabinets.

Swapping cabinets, counters, flooring and fixtures in the same places is normally treated as cosmetic and needs no permit. You cross the line the moment you move plumbing or gas, add or relocate circuits, or take out a wall. Rules are set city by city, so one call to your building department before you order costs nothing — and pulling a permit after the fact costs a great deal.

Inspect before you sign. Note any damage on the delivery receipt, then photograph the pallet, the cartons and the parts from several angles, and report it inside the supplier’s claim window (often about five days). The part people get wrong: do not assemble or install a damaged cabinet. Most claims require the unit unassembled, and building it can end your right to a replacement. Keep the packaging until the claim closes — and unbox everything the day it lands, not the morning you plan to install.

The cabinet price is the part everyone budgets for; the overruns live everywhere else. Budget separately for: moving plumbing, gas or electrical; drywall and floor patching where the old kitchen came out (the floor under old cabinets is almost never finished); countertop template, cut-outs and edge upgrades; appliance delivery and installation, plus the faucet, sink and disposal nobody counts as appliances; waste removal for a kitchen’s worth of debris; and permits if you are moving services. Then add a 10–15% contingency and treat it as spent. The other quiet drain is scope creep — a nicer pull here, a second sink there — which is why the decisions belong on a plan, before anything is ordered.

Worth it: drawers instead of doors in your base cabinets (the single upgrade people say changed how the kitchen works); soft-close on everything you open daily; a hard-wearing countertop on the run you actually prep on; and lighting under the wall cabinets. Usually not: interior gadgets you will use once, upgrading the box on cabinets nobody opens, and paying for a premium finish on a door style you will be tired of in five years. The general rule: spend on the things your hands touch every day, save on the things behind a closed door.

Roughly 40% of a whole-kitchen budget is a realistic planning figure for cabinetry, with countertops, appliances, flooring and the trades sharing the rest. Doing the install yourself is what changes the maths: labour is typically the largest single line on a professionally quoted kitchen, so a DIY install is where the real saving sits — not in buying a cheaper box. Work out the 40% first, then see which door style and hardware fit inside it.

Plan on weeks, not days. Stock cabinets can ship quickly; semi-custom and custom commonly run six to eight weeks, and specialty finishes or imported items can reach eight to twelve. Stone countertops add another one to two weeks after templating — and templating cannot happen until the base cabinets are installed and level. Build that sequence into the calendar before you pick a start date; it is the part that surprises people, not the install.

From demolition to a working kitchen is commonly a few weeks for a DIY cabinet swap, and longer if trades or a stone countertop are in the sequence — the countertop gap alone is one to two weeks with no work surface and often no sink. Set up a temporary kitchen in another room before you demolish anything: a microwave, a kettle, a mini-fridge or a cooler, a portable induction hob, and a plastic tub for washing up. Most people find that workable for six to eight weeks. Move the coffee-making first — that is the one that decides how the household feels about the project.

Yes — and for most DIYers that is the sane way to do it. The natural break points are: assemble all the boxes (evenings, in another room), then base cabinets in one go, then wall cabinets, then doors, handles and toe kicks. Two rules make staging work. Finish a whole run before you stop — a half-fastened run is not stable. And do not book the countertop template until the entire base layer is in and level, because the template is a snapshot of what exists on that day.

No. This is the most expensive scheduling mistake in the whole project: a torn-out kitchen sitting idle for three weeks because the delivery slipped. Wait until the cabinets are on site, unboxed and checked against the order — damage and shortages are exactly what the claim window exists for, and you want to find them while you still have a working sink. Demolition is a weekend. Waiting for a replacement door is a fortnight.

Paint first, then touch up afterwards. Cutting a clean line against brand-new cabinetry is slow, fiddly and unforgiving, while a bit of overspray on a wall you are about to paint anyway costs nothing — and manoeuvring heavy boxes into a room scuffs fresh paint every time. Do the ceiling before anything else, get the walls to their finish coat, install the kitchen, then walk round with a small brush at the end. The one exception is the backsplash area, which is usually left until the counters are in.

Somewhere dry, flat and indoors. Particleboard and MDF hate moisture, so a garage floor, an exterior wall or a room that is still being drywalled and mudded are all bad ideas. Keep the cartons upright and off the concrete on scrap timber, leave the doors and hardware packed until you actually need them, and give the boxes a day or two indoors to acclimatise before you build them. Check every carton against the packing list the day it arrives, not the week you install — damage claims have deadlines.