What Happens When Your Contractor Walks Away Mid Renovation: Part 1

DIYKitchen RemodelKitchen & Bath DesignKitchen Organization

Mar 23

A whte kitchen, mid renovation. part of the walls are just drywall, the cabinets do not all have drawer fronts, the dining room is visible through the doorway

What we started with.

When we moved into our brand new home we 'built' with a very large home builder, we knew we were going to have to do a kitchen renovation. I use the term 'built' loosely. This is a bottom tier build where we got to make about 3 choices: countertops, flooring, and color of the exterior. We chose the upgrade to the kitchen cabinets and to add the optional fireplace. It's a 2500 square foot home with a 2 car garage, 5 bedrooms, and 3 full bathrooms. And a tiny kitchen with 3 access points, a tiny pantry, and almost no counter space. Let’s look back at the original, before we started the kitchen renovation.

kitchen pre renovation, brown counters, whtie cabinets, dining room visible but empty through doorway

view of kitchen from living space pre renovation

kitchen with small pantry and view of dining room

View from the dining room through the kitchen to the back

Light it up

Yes, they still put florescent lights in cheap homes. Bless. That was literally one of the first things I took out of this house. I absolutely could not. I chose the cheapest counter because they were all, well, ugly. We took care of that in Phase 1. The tiny pantry and tiny amount of counter space were absolutely not going to work for our family of 7. The pony wall that could have been a breakfast bar, the opening to the dining room that wasn't wide enough for the fridge door to open all of the way, the dining room light switch that we felt really belonged on a different wall. There were so many things. We moved into this home in February 2020. And I had a 7 week old, a 20 month old and 3 bigger kids.

Phase 1 fixes

When my mom was here for a visit, I enlisted her to help with a couple of "kitchen renovation" upgrades. They were high impact, low cost, mid level effort. We took off the counter on the pony wall behind the sink, put on a 1x8 and painted it white. The counter there was still a stuff catcher, just a nicer looking one. We covered the counters in vinyl, a removable product, which lasted the next 3 years because my mother is so incredibly good at making things as perfect as possible. I mean look at those corner and edges. The woman is a master. These kinds of products are normally advertised as lasting a year or so because of normal wear and tear.

Kitchen after phase 1 changes, a vinyl product to cover the brown counters, a painted wood piece instead of the brown counter behind the sink, the cabinets are still white,

Kitchen with microwave over the stove, both stainless, whtie cabinets, stainless toaster, and wood accents on the other side of the stove. Medium tone lvp floors.

A close up of the corners with the vinyl covering them, done very meticulously.

The next phase of the Phase 1 kitchen renovation

So, I refuse to say this is a multi-phase kitchen situation. It's a Phase 1 and then the Final Renovation. The next step in the kitchen was to source matching cabinets. That took two years, no lie. But we did, and then the contractor we hired ghosted us. We demo'd our tiny pantry and he installed a very wonky wall that was concave on one side and convex on the other. So I slapped some cabinets on my wonky wall, and bought a counter from Home Depot, cut it down with my circular saw, and we lived like this for 3 years. I did install some shelves because I refused to live with all of the storage potential being wasted right in my face.

At one point in there our over-the-stove microwave died, twice, and I refused to pay the $$$ to replace it again. So, I got an affordable vent hood from Wayfair and was going to install it myself until we took the cabinet down and the builders had done a very poor job installing the outlet over the stove. So I had to hire an electrician to come move the outlet for me and he had to install it protruding out from the wall instead of being hidden inside the wall, due to the previously mentioned incompetent builders.

What was a doorway to the kitchen now closed in with drywall

The other side of the kitchen wall with the old pantry also drywalled in. drop clth and supplies still on the floor

Mid renovation, contractor ghosted us, this shows the first of the cabinets that I just slid into place and screwed in so we could use the space until we found a new contractor

Third cabinet slid in to finish out the space

The laminate counter top I picked up to put on top of the cabinets I slid into place.

Put the counter top in place to see how much I needed to cut off

Selfie of woman in black shirt with the temporary counter/cabinets, and white open shelving on the wall with black brackets.

Kitchen with white cabinets the microwave and over the microwave cabinet gone, a new black range hood, and a hole in the wall left by the original contractors who intially put the outllet in the wrong place.

The moral of the story

Simple changes like vinyl countertop covers and removing useless 'bar tops' can make a space livable until you can do more. Sometimes you start a renovation and things go sideways. That's life. Do what you can, we had a severely bowed wall, I installed cabinets and shelves on it anyway until we could figure out the actual fix.

Cheers!
Melinda

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