Kitchen renovations are often poorly designed – and therefore negatively impact the value of homes. Today poorly designed kitchens are more common than the kitchens purchased 15 years ago. How is it that cabinet construction is improving but kitchen designs are getting worse. Actually, there are many reasons – please read on.
Internet and searching online has made consumers believe that they are knowledgeable about cabinetry and kitchen design.
Many professions have this challenge. For example, physicians now have poorly informed patients who believe that after browsing WebMD, they know as much as medical experts. These patients form strong opinions from reading unverified information they found on the web. Armchair medical experts jeopardize their family’s health with their misplaced confidence in their medical knowledge. And online educated kitchen designers put the value of their home at substantial risk.
Consumers who embark on kitchen renovations with misplaced confidence from Google searches and from watching TV shows create terribly designed kitchens.
These amateur kitchen experiments sometimes drag on for years due to problems created by bad design, missed calculations and poor planning.
It’s not uncommon for homeowners to go through several contractors. Plus these projects frustrate cabinet, countertop, and appliance dealers with their poor planning. A sure route to delays and unnecessary costs!
Another misguided source of information is HGTV and The DIY Network. Main Line Kitchen Design has worked with several HGTV and DIY network shows. Surprisingly the kitchen renovations done on these shows are equally amateurish. This is due to the celebrity designers having no formal training or experience. So homeowners using what they learned from watching these shows is the blind leading the blind so to speak.
The recent influx of people without training or experience presenting themselves as interior designers and remodelers are another source for the increased number of badly designed and poorly planned kitchens. Trained only by watching HGTV, and reading threads on Houzz.com and Reddit, amateurs portray themselves as knowledgeable professionals to the unsuspecting public.
Houzz.com provides inexperienced self-starters with free websites, and inexpensive business and design software.
These tools allow for non-professionals to come off much more capable than they are. Fifteen years ago, industry event attendees were all professionals, with many years of experience. Recently, at least half of the people at these events have set up shop without ever working in our field. They are newbies and advise homeowners on complex kitchen renovations without training or any experience beyond what they have learned from their own projects over the course of a year or two. The results speak for themselves. See the DIY attempt below:
Home Centers under compensate their kitchen designers
Home Centers like Lowe’s and The Home Depot account for a significant amount of the kitchen renovations in the US. Unfortunately, both companies pay kitchen designers much less than they did 15 years ago. The result is that only less experienced and less qualified designers work for home centers. And, because home center customers work with lower paid, less qualified designers, they get poorer kitchen designs.
Cabinet manufacturers that once required cabinet dealers to have showrooms and the qualifications needed to be competent kitchen designers now sell directly to less qualified builders and remodelers.
These design and build companies can be good general contractors but they are always poor designers because they do not pay the kitchen designers that work for them much more than home centers. The cabinet manufacturers lowered their standards due to financial stress and greed. The result has been another added wave of poorly designed kitchens. Today, home owners need to look closely at the designs of the people they intend to buy cabinetry from. Do the company’s designs appear professional, functional, and attractive? How many years of experience does the kitchen designer have? Does the designer seem knowledgeable and transparent?
Here is a link to Main Line Kitchen Design’s Gallery page. How does your kitchen company compare?
