Two kitchens of the same size, in two houses on the same Ballard block, can land in very different places on price. The countertop is almost never the reason. What separates them is a handful of structural and scope decisions made early — whether the plumbing moves, whether a wall comes out, what the walls turn out to be hiding — and most of those decisions get made before anyone has picked a tile.
We are not going to publish a number here. A number before design is a guess dressed up as information, and a guess is what causes the change orders and the awkward conversations later. What we can do is show you exactly which levers move the cost, so that when you sit down to make choices you know which ones are consequential and which ones are close to free.
What moves the number most?
Scope, then cabinetry, then the condition of the house. In roughly that order.
Scope means how far the project reaches. A kitchen that keeps its footprint, keeps its plumbing where it is, and replaces what’s there is a fundamentally different project from one that absorbs a butler’s pantry, opens into the dining room, and relocates the range. The second one is not a more expensive version of the first. It is a different job, with structural work, permitting, and trades that the first one never needed.
This is why we resist the idea of a kitchen budget as a single figure attached to a room. The room isn’t the variable. What you are asking the room to become is.
Does moving the sink or the range actually cost that much?
Moving a sink means moving drain and vent lines, and in an older Seattle house those lines are frequently cast iron running through a floor system you cannot simply cut. Drainage needs slope, and slope needs somewhere to go. In a house on a slab or over a tight crawlspace, a few feet of relocation can mean opening the floor across the room.
Moving a range is a gas line, a larger electrical circuit, or both — plus venting. Ducting a hood to the exterior is straightforward on an outside wall and considerably less straightforward through a joist bay to the far side of a 1920s bungalow. In our damp winters, real exterior venting matters more here than in a drier climate, so we do not treat recirculating as an easy substitute.
None of this makes relocation the wrong choice. Plenty of Seattle kitchens are laid out backwards for how people live now, and fixing that is exactly the point of remodeling. It just needs to be a decision you make deliberately, knowing what it carries, rather than one that arrives as a surprise mid-construction.
Why does cabinetry swing the price so much?
Because cabinetry is simultaneously the largest surface area in the room, the structural framework everything else attaches to, and the item with the widest span of how it can be made. Box construction, drawer boxes and glides, door style, finish method, and how much of the run is custom to your walls all compound.
The part homeowners underestimate is how much old Seattle houses drive cabinetry decisions. Plaster-and-lath walls are rarely plumb. Floors in a house that has settled for a hundred years are rarely level. Filling those gaps neatly is either scribed, custom work or it is a run of visible shims and caulk. We’d rather show you that trade-off in drawings than let it surface on install day.
What does an older Seattle house add that a newer one doesn’t?
Three things show up again and again once demolition opens the walls in houses built between the 1920s and the 1940s.
- Knob-and-tube wiring. Once you open a wall and touch the circuits, the electrical in that area generally has to come up to current code. A kitchen is the most circuit-hungry room in the house, so this is common rather than exceptional.
- Water damage you couldn’t see. Long, slow leaks under a sink or behind a dishwasher rot subfloor and sometimes framing. It is invisible until the cabinets come out.
- Framing that isn’t what the drawings assume. Undersized joists, a wall that turns out to be carrying load, a beam pocket someone cut through in 1974. Older houses have been remodeled before, and not always well.
A firm working from an estimate handles these with allowances and change orders. We handle them by investigating during design — opening what can be opened, verifying in the field, and bringing in structural engineering while the project is still on paper. It is less exciting and much less expensive than finding out later.
Which decisions barely move the cost at all?
More than you’d think, and this is the good news in the whole conversation. Cabinet door style is largely a design decision, not a budget one. Paint color is free. Hardware, within a wide band, is a small line. The layout of the interior of a drawer costs almost nothing at the drawing stage and changes how the kitchen feels every single day.
The pattern is consistent: decisions about what things are tend to move the number. Decisions about how things look often don’t. Our background is in interior design, so we can usually find the version of an idea that delivers the feeling you’re after without dragging the structural scope along with it — a change in cabinet configuration rather than a change in wall position, for instance.
So how do we price a kitchen without guessing?
We design it first. Fully. Layout resolved, appliances specified, cabinetry drawn to your actual walls, electrical and lighting planned, every material selected — not an allowance for tile, the tile. Then we price that specific project as a fixed bid, and that is the number you decide on before any construction contract is signed.
It means the cost conversation happens later than it does elsewhere, and it means we ask you to invest in design before we can tell you the number. What you get in exchange is a price built on a real, complete scope instead of a hopeful average. Our post on why we won’t quote a kitchen before it’s designed goes further into the reasoning, and how a fixed-price bid works explains the mechanics. You can see the kind of work it produces on our kitchen remodeling page, and the whole approach is the reason NOR Design & Construction exists as one team rather than two.
Bring us the kitchen you’re weighing and the parts of it you’re unsure about — the wall, the island, the range that’s in the wrong place. We’ll tell you honestly which of those carries real cost and which is a design choice, then design the project and give you a fixed price for it. Start with a design consultation, or call us at 206.979.3420.
