My husband and I lived out in the country on twenty acres of land. Our home was twelve years old when we bought it. We bought it in a drought year and unfortunately the next years when the rains came we discovered there were water issues in the crawl space basement. After getting several opinions we decided that the best ting to do was to raise the house and put a full basement underneath it, otherwise we were going to have dry rot throughout the entire house. With the full basement our three bedroom two bathroom home would now have the potential for three additional bedrooms, another bath as well as a family room. We raised the house and added the basement.
We decided that with a house the size we now had it would be a good investment to redo the kitchen area as a selling point. We already had the expense of adding the basement, but we checked into kitchen remodeling costs. We had a contractor come out to look at our home. He looked through the new opened basement, and agreed that if we were going to sell soon it would be best to upgrade the kitchen and let the new owners create what they wanted in the basement level, especially when we did not need the added room. We gave him a brief description of what we wanted and asked him to give us an estimate of the kitchen remodeling costs.
He took measurements and photos as well as our wishes and came up with two estimates. One was a great deal higher than the other because he figured in all new cabinets. The lower estimate used our existing cabinets with new fronts. The kitchen remodeling costs were still higher than what we wanted to invest. He suggested that we could save a great deal of money if we did the demolition ourselves. He also suggested painting the cabinets and putting on new hardware. There was paneling in the kitchen and informal dining area and a dropped ceiling. We tore out the ceiling and the paneling. We went and pick-up the sheet rock for the new walls and ceilings and had a neighbor boy help us unload it. We then learned how to paint wood cabinets from a do it yourself home store. We hired a person to tape and spray the sheet rocking once we had it hung. The project took us three months, but the final results were wonderful and our kitchen remodeling costs were under a thousand dollars. It was a great savings, plus we had the satisfaction of doing it ourselves.