At a Crossroads

The pandemic has thrown a wrench in just about every part of this project. Getting information from the potential cabinet companies took forever. It took forever to order the cabinets. It took forever to get the cabinets delivered and shipped. It took forever to even get me flooring samples when we got to that stage.

Then it took forever to find a contractor. The last six months, more or less, and not for lack of trying. The results of that process have thrown a wrench in the project. Either way, it’s going to be a lot more expensive than I had hoped. Thanks, pandemic.

First, a few steps back. A few years ago, when I bought this apartment, I had poorly-informed delusions about how much such a project might cost. In retrospect, the thought I could do anything meaningful for $25,000 was laughable. After a few years of savings and a bit of re-calibration, I landed on a more realistic figure of $45,000 for the project when I brought it back to life a year ago.

Working to that figure has been a strong input to the process. It’s the reason I bought cabinets from Reform rather than, say, SieMatic as I’d hoped might just maybe be affordable. (If you haven’t read that post, they very much were not even remotely within my budget.) It was equally reassuring that my architects had done a project along the same lines in 2019 that had construction costs in line with that sort of budget.

But the pandemic threw a wrench in all that. Accounting for the cabinets and appliances, that left around $25,000 for construction and materials. Not a trivial sum! The bids my architects got blew that out of the water.

The first was for roughly $44,000. The second was for close to $50,000, nearly double the budgeted amount. The third wouldn’t even give a precise estimate, from what I heard.

As it was conveyed to me, several pieces contributed to these astronomical quotes.

First, supply chain issues. In the design my architects put together, the worktops and backsplash are designed to be made out of Corian. The counters need to be in half-inch because they need to support the work of cooking. But the backsplash and protective caps on the upper cabinets don’t, and could be made of (much cheaper) quarter-inch Corian. The quarter-inch product, however, is apparently not easy to get right now, so one of the bids used half-inch instead, doubling the materials cost for that component.

Second, the incredible demand that still exists for contractors and people in the construction industry. It’s likely some of the prices are so high simply to make the market clear. If you want to do a project now, it will not be cheap.

Third, my impression is that we slightly underestimated the overheads involved in working in my neighborhood. Parking is scarce, and it’s a multi-family building (with all the concomitant rules and regulations), not a single-family suburban home with easy access and few restrictions.

What to do, then?

Either way, I’m resigned to spending more than I had planned to. Fortunately, I’m in a position to do that, so it shouldn’t be a big problem. The more vexed question is exactly how much more to spend.

The current thought is to wait, hoping the demand for contractors cools down a bit, and expand the scope to spread out the project overheads a bit more. I had planned to eventually redo the bathroom and add more storage eventually, why not do it now? Especially if I have to spend so much more anyway.

I’m still waiting on meta-estimates from the contractors on demand trends heading into next year. If they see it tapering off, that might be one indication to wait. And then, if I wind up doing the additional projects, it’s back to the drawing board with my architects to design a bathroom!

In the meantime, I’m going to have to start spending about $100 every month to keep my cabinets — which have made it to the US from Denmark — in storage somewhere in New Jersey.