It is usually the second question on a first phone call. Someone describes their kitchen — a 1930s house in Ballard, galley layout, a wall they want gone — and then, reasonably, asks what something like that runs. We understand why the question comes early. It is the question that determines whether the rest of the conversation is worth having.
Our answer is that we do not know yet, and neither does anyone else who has not designed your kitchen. That is not evasion. It is the single most important thing we do differently, and it is worth explaining exactly what sits behind it.
Why can’t you just give me a ballpark?
We could. It would take about four seconds and it would be an average of other people’s kitchens.
A ballpark is built from projects that are not yours. It does not know that the wall you want removed is carrying the roof load in a house on a Fauntleroy slope lot. It does not know whether your panel can take an induction range and a heat pump, or whether the original knob-and-tube in the ceiling is live. It does not know if you want inset cabinet doors, which are a different piece of cabinetry than overlay doors in the same species. It does not know whether your floor is original fir that needs to be feathered into a new run, or a 1990s laminate that gets thrown in a dumpster.
Any of those can move a kitchen’s cost meaningfully. A number given before we know them is a placeholder wearing the costume of a price — and the problem with placeholders is that homeowners understandably plan their lives around them.
What is actually inside a number quoted before design?
Assumptions. Sometimes stated, more often not.
Every early quote contains a set of guesses about what you will choose and what the house will require. Cabinetry at some unnamed level of quality. Tile at some price per square foot. Countertops in a material nobody has selected. Electrical work sized to a scope nobody has drawn. When those guesses are written into the document at all, they usually appear as allowances — a line that says, in effect, we have set aside this much for your tile, and we will settle up later.
An allowance is a placeholder, and it moves the moment a real selection is made. The homeowner picks the tile they actually want, the allowance was set below it, and the difference shows up as a change order. Nobody behaved badly. The number was simply never a price. Multiply that across cabinetry, counters, plumbing fixtures, lighting and hardware, and you have a project whose cost is discovered gradually, during construction, while you are living without a kitchen and least able to make a calm decision.
We are not willing to run projects that way, so we built our process to remove the mechanism entirely.
So what do I get instead of a range?
A design, and then an exact price for that design.
Our design and remodeling process starts with a paid design phase, because the work is real work: measuring the house, investigating what is behind the walls where it matters, developing the plan and elevations, sizing the electrical and mechanical, and selecting every material — the specific cabinet line, the specific slab, the specific tile, the specific faucet, the specific pendant over the island.
Then we price that. Our trade partners bid real drawings with real specifications rather than a verbal description, which is why their numbers hold. What comes back to you is one fixed-price bid for a fully designed kitchen: not a range, not a range with a contingency, not a set of allowances that resolve later. A price, for this kitchen, before you sign a construction contract.
You are free to walk away at that point. Some people do, and they leave holding a complete design of their own kitchen and a real number for it — which is far more than they had when they started.
Doesn’t the design phase cost money too?
It does, and we would rather be direct about that than bury it. You are paying for design work before you have a construction commitment.
What that buys is the removal of the two most expensive things that happen in remodeling. The first is redesign — discovering after the fact that the kitchen you fell in love with was never going to price where you hoped, and starting over with everyone’s time already spent. The second is decisions made in the middle of construction, which are always more expensive than the same decisions made on paper, because the framing is already up and the cabinet order is already in the shop.
It also shortens the part you actually feel. When every selection is made and every material is in hand before demolition, the build runs without the pauses that stretch a kitchen project across a season. Our clients get their kitchen back sooner, which is worth more than most people expect right up until they are washing dishes in a bathroom sink.
What changes the number once it exists?
You do — deliberately, on paper, while it is cheap to change your mind.
During design we test options in front of you. Keeping the plumbing where it is versus moving the sink to the window. A full-height run of cabinetry versus open wall. Quartz versus a stone that needs sealing. Each of those has a cost consequence, and you see it while the drawing is still a drawing. That is the moment to steer, and it is a completely different conversation than being handed a change order in week five.
What we will not do is start with a number and design backwards toward it by quietly thinning what is behind the cabinet doors. A kitchen remodel is largely invisible work — structure, wiring, venting, the boxes themselves — and that is precisely the work that gets cheapened when a price came first.
If you have been collecting quotes and none of them agree, the reason is almost always that they are pricing different, undrawn projects. We would rather show you what yours actually is. Come in and walk us through your kitchen — how you cook in it, what you have outgrown, what you would keep — and let NOR Design & Construction design it properly and hand you one real price at the end. Book a design consultation, or call 206.979.3420 to start the conversation.
