You're late for Thanksgiving

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​It’s November 23rd, 2023, Thanksgiving Day, and you’re hosting.
 
As you scramble to read recipes and negotiate oven timing between your turkey and sides, your guests start to arrive.  You run to the front door for some quick pleasantries but leave the hosting to your spouse as you quickly retreat back to the kitchen.  

Slowly, but consistently, your guests start to meander from the living room to the kitchen.  They mean well. 
 
“Is there anything I can help with?” 
 
If there were more room in the kitchen, or a better layout, or a second oven, or additional prep space, you would say YES! before they finished asking the question.  But you don’t have those things, so the only thing you need right now is to be able to focus on getting dinner on the table.  You can’t focus though. 
 
Your guests mean well.  They really do.  Now they’re lingering though.  Making small talk in the kitchen.  Standing in the space that you can’t afford to have them stand in right now. 
 
This is it, you tell yourself.  The last Thanksgiving you’ll ever host in THIS configuration of your house.  Next year will be different.  Better.
 
You’ve been planning to remodel your kitchen since you bought the house, but every time you think about starting the process, something else comes up that derails you.  Not anymore.  It’s finally time.  You promise yourself you’ll start the process in January – that will give you almost 10 months to design and build your dream kitchen.  Plenty of time.
 
You get through the rest of the holiday season.  It’s a new year - 2024.  Time for a new layout for your home. YAY!
 
The new year at work starts busy, and you don’t have quite as much time as you expected to research which companies you want to meet with about the remodel.  Then your kid wants to do indoor sports this winter and that takes time.  Suddenly, it’s February.  No problem though, you have almost 9 full months to get the project done.    
You make some inquiries and set up a few meetings for later in the month.  You’re getting wildly different advice and budget ranges, and you’re not sure which way to go.  You think on it a bit.  Now it’s March, and you still haven’t hired anyone.  You still have almost 8 full months though…that must be enough time.
 
The problem is, it’s not.  You’re late for Thanksgiving.
 
In Designed Happy, The Book I wrote about the idea of a reverse timeline and how it helps you to know when you need to start a project to allow you to hit a certain completion date.  Let’s use that tool here.

Thursday, November 28th 2024 – T-Day

November 15th – Start to organize the new space
 
Before you can cook anything in your new space, you’ll need time to get all of your old (and some new) stuff organized in the new space.  Let’s say that takes about 2 weeks, which gives you a little buffer the week of Thanksgiving.

​November 1st – Punch out starts
 
Before you can do any organizing, the final bits of construction need to be completed and the space needs to be cleaned.  That’s called Punch Out and you should allow 2 weeks for that.

​August 5th – Construction starts
 
For punch out to be able to start, construction needs to be finished.  For a project like this, where you’re moving parts of your kitchen around, opening walls, and (likely) making some structural changes, you should plan for at least 12 weeks.  If you’re being told less than that, ask why.

​June 3rd – Order cabinets and file for building permit
 
Before construction can start, you need materials and (likely) a building permit.  Material lead times can vary widely.  As of this writing, there are still refrigerators that can take up to a year to be delivered.  For this exercise, let’s say you’re choosing materials that are all readily available with their normal lead time.  The material with the longest lead time will be your cabinets.  Custom cabinets can take anywhere from 8 weeks to 16 weeks to be made.  Let’s be aggressive with our estimate and say they will take 8 weeks.  Now, you don’t technically need cabinets on day 1 of construction, but they are a pretty important part of a kitchen remodel, so if I were you, I’d rather have them on site a bit early than a bit late.  So, we’re ordering cabinets 8 weeks before construction starts.  That should be the week of June 10th, but the 4th of July holiday is in that production window, so we need to add another week, just to be safe. 
 
Depending on where you live, these 8 weeks we’re allocating for cabinets may be plenty of time to get a building permit, or not nearly enough.  Generally, the closer you live to a big city, the longer it will take to get.  If it’s going to take longer than 8 weeks, you’ll need to add time to this section.

​March 11th – Start the design process
 
Of course, before we can order any materials or file for the building permit, we need to know what the specifics of the project are.  So, let’s account for the design time.  You’ve been thinking about this project for years.  You want to have a fun design experience – one where the timing is comfortable, and you can enjoy the process.  There are a lot of decisions to make, and rushing through them will lead to unnecessary stress.  To do a thorough, steady, job with the design process, you should account for at least 12 weeks.  That will give you time to see different options in both the preliminary design and selections processes.  (If you know you have trouble making, and committing, to decisions, give yourself a few more weeks here)

​March 1st – Accept a proposal
 
To be able to start the design process, you need to meet with firms, find the one that is the right fit, get a proposal from them, sign it, pay the deposit, and get on their schedule.  The interview process will be a different amount of time for everyone, but it will likely be 1-2 weeks from when you accept a proposal to when that company can come measure your house to formally start the design process.

​There you have it.  Today is March 1st, 2024, and if you haven’t signed a proposal to start the design process, you are officially Late For Thanksgiving.
 
There are, of course, ways to affect this timeline to reduce the amount of time it takes to get from right now to a new kitchen by Thanksgiving.  Reducing the timeline without adding stress to your life is a job that I would only trust to the absolute most experienced and thoughtful professionals.  There will likely be some compromises somewhere in the process to get you to a finished project faster, and you’ll want to know exactly what those are as they’re coming up.
 
If you’re looking for a kitchen before Thanksgiving, let's chat to see if we can help get you the entertaining space you’ve been dreaming about and make this T-Day the best one you’ve ever hosted.
 
Bye for now,
TJ